York scientist says biotech conservation tools will likely be ‘modest’
The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, the government-backed body created to fund high-risk research, announced Monday that it would distribute £30m to 14 teams developing biotechnology tools to help British wildlife adapt to a rapidly changing climate. The grants are the first wave of a £54m “accelerated adaptation” programme running until 2030; an additional £24m will be available to projects that show early promise.
Yannick Wurm, director of Aria’s accelerated adaptation programme and a professor of evolutionary genomics at Queen Mary University of London, said natural environments are now changing so rapidly that many species cannot adapt quickly enough through conventional conservation alone. “This cohort is a first exploration of how we can harness some of the powers of biotechnology to responsibly help wild animals and plants to overcome challenges they face,” Wurm said. He compared the proposed tools to mRNA vaccines for humans and said the projects would complement existing measures such as protected reserves with new “precision tools.”
One team, led by researchers at the University of Exeter, will use Crispr-Cas9 to edit the genome of the swallowtail butterfly, a species on Britain’s red list of endangered insects, to increase its resistance to insecticides widely used on farms. Another, at Cardiff University, aims to prevent ash dieback by injecting trees with RNA molecules that interfere with the fungus’s ability to infect. “So it is like giving the tree a vaccination,” said project lead Sarah Christofides, a mycologist at Cardiff.
A consortium including Boston-based Cultivarium, Imperial College London and Queen Mary University of London will genetically engineer a bacterium that lives on amphibians’ skin to produce proteins that “bind and stop” the chytrid fungal infection, which has caused population declines in more than 500 amphibian species. “We’re not genetically engineering the amphibian; rather what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give them a shield,” said Cultivarium co-founder Henry Lee.
Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research facility in Hertfordshire, will work on gene-editing long-lived tree species such as oaks so they can reproduce in months rather than decades, enabling faster adaptation to drought and invasive pathogens.
Aria was created at the initiative of Dominic Cummings, then chief adviser to Boris Johnson, who said the agency would fund “crazy” ideas that could “restore Britain’s place as a scientific superpower.” The body has attracted criticism for funding controversial geoengineering research and for channelling millions in UK taxpayer funds to US technology companies and venture capital firms. Matt Clifford, Aria’s chair, stepped down this month after a senior MP cited a “clear conflict of interest” following Clifford’s taking a job at Anthropic, the developer of the AI chatbot Claude.
Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger, chair of the programme’s ethical and social responsibility advisory committee and a professor of international law at the University of Cambridge, said none of the experimental solutions would be released into the wild during the programme. “The decision was made early to have the strongest possible code,” she said, adding that all grantees will work in secure laboratories.
Cordonier Segger said the ethical framework draws on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s first global policy on synthetic biology, adopted at its world conservation congress last October after more than 90 NGOs called for a ban on the technologies. The IUCN narrowly rejected the ban after 250 scientists signed an open letter highlighting potential benefits, including the ability to eliminate invasive mice that threaten more than 100 birds and reptiles on small islands. Instead, the IUCN adopted stringent criteria for proposed synthetic biology solutions.
Chris Thomas, founding director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York, said the projects Aria is funding offer potentially valuable tools at a time when many species and ecosystems face drought, pathogens and other threats. But he cautioned that the impact of these solutions will probably be “modest” and difficult to assess. “To think that these interventions have an important role to play in preventing biodiversity loss is probably pretty naive,” he said.
For deployment in the field, Thomas added, solutions will need approval from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has tightly controlled releases of genetically modified organisms.
Wurm said he hoped that a handful of successes from the programme would be “world-changing,” but acknowledged that halting and reversing the human-controlled drivers of environmental change remains the “most urgent challenge.”