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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CHIC (Chicory as a multipurpose crop for dietary fibre and medicinal terpenes)

Teaser

Summary

Chicory varieties, such as Belgian endive and Italian radicchio have been used as food in salads for a long time. They are appreciated for their characteristic bitter taste. The crop that is called root chicory, the plant under study in CHIC, is cultivated for the food fibre inulin. Inulin is a prebiotic; it boosts the growth of beneficial gut bacteria and stimulates our immune system. The inulin fibre is extracted from the root and included in foods such as yoghurts and cereal bars as low-calorie sweetener, fat replacer and enhancer of gut health. However, root chicory has much more potential. In addition to inulin, chicory roots accumulate different terpenes. There are thousands of different terpenes in nature and many of them are able to inhibit, like antibiotics, the growth of fungi or bacteria, or are reported to prevent cancer cells from growing.
The CHIC project aims to improve the quality of chicory to the benefit of consumers. CHIC will make targeted changes in the genome in order to develop chicory varieties that on the one hand produce more and healthier inulin food fiber and on the other hand produce sufficient amounts of medicinal terpenes. Developing a new chicory variety via conventional plant breeding can easily take between one and two decades. Some of the traits CHIC wants to improve are almost impossible to achieve by conventional breeding. Therefore, the ambition of CHIC is to develop a New Plant Breeding Technique known as genome editing (CRISPR) to breed chicory in a much shorter time frame into a robust multipurpose crop, from which products with human health benefit can be extracted. CHIC will develop two business cases based on improved inulin as dietary fibre and medicinal terpenes.
The CHIC consortium will evaluate several genome editing variants with respect to efficiency, safety, as well as to environmental, regulatory, socio-economic and broader societal issues. In public debates, genome editing frequently raises high expectations as well as strong concerns. Therefore, CHIC will involve a broad range of stakeholders to raise awareness and discuss issues associated with the chicory varieties developed in the project and with genome editing in general. These include techno-economic potential, health benefits, possible environmental and socio-economic impacts, broader societal issues, safety concerns as well as regulatory and policy measures. CHIC strives to open communication also implementing innovative communication methods. For example, artists will make themselves familiar with genome editing techniques and express their feelings and views in art works to inspire a broader public debate. By involving stakeholders and by raising public awareness at all phases of the project, CHIC strives to ensure responsible and desired innovation.

Work performed

The activities of the CHIC project, which is now in month 18 from the 54, can be divided in three areas of equal importance: development of genome editing technology, impact assessment, and communication & stakeholder engagement
Chicory is a relatively little investigated crop and gene editing protocols had to be developed. Several different variants of CRISPR protocols were developed which will be compared on aspects such as efficiency and safety. The first chicory plants with adaptations in the genome of both the inulin and terpene biosynthesis pathways were confirmed in the laboratories of several partners. The plants are now growing in the greenhouses until the stage that the effect of the adaptations on the inulin and terpene accumulation can be studied in the roots. Many more plants are still being produced. Methods for testing safety aspects such as off-target mutations are in development. Bioassays with extracts from roots of wild-type chicory have detected some interesting medicinal activities, including possible leads for novel antibiotics.
With respect to socio-economic impact, the most important indicators such as job creation, creation of new value chains, distribution and trade between countries and European competitiveness were defined. With broad input of all partners, six commercialisation scenarios were defined that differ in aspects such as whether CRISPR edited chicory is regulated as GMO or not, whether it is grown in the open field or greenhouses and what type of products are isolated from them. These scenarios will be evaluated for their socio-economic and environmental impacts. Both are important input for the two business cases that we aim for. A Stakeholder Advisory Group with representatives of industry, academia, agriculture and end-users is in place which interacts on a regular basis with the CHIC consortium to provide input and advice.
CHIC also monitors regulations related to genome editing worldwide as this may have impact on research, field trials and commercialisation of new chicory varieties. The regulatory field is at the moment changing fast and big differences appear between continents and countries. For the EU, the European Court of Justice ruled that all genome edited plants are regulated as GMOs, whereas this is not the case in other countries such as USA, Argentina and Australia. The consequences of this ruling for the CHIC project itself was extensively discussed internally as well as with external experts and it was concluded that the planned activities remain as relevant as before, but that it might have consequences for the two business cases to be developed as well as for the focus of the stakeholder assessment process.
A lot of emphasis has been put on communication about the CHIC project and its aims. A website from which flyers, newsletters and an explanatory movie (http://chicproject.eu/videos/) can be accessed and social media channels, are in place. Artists have started to visit laboratories of several partners in order to create art works which are aimed to increase interactions and awareness of, in particular, the general public. Partners have presented CHIC at conferences and workshops, also at events such as Research Nights aimed at young citizens.

Final results

Chicory is a robust crop which requires relatively little inputs such as fertilisers or pesticides. It has high potential to produce many different products, but this potential is at the moment difficult to capture since traditional breeding of chicory is difficult.
At the end of the project CHIC expects to have developed tools that can be used in breeding programs to improve properties of chicory when needed. This can have significant impact on the volume of chicory cultivation, on the regions where it will be cultivated as well as on processing and (food) industries that can use chicory as starting material. And consequently, there is an impact for people active in these new value chains (job creation). In the project itself, we will develop chicory varieties and business cases for improved food fibers and medicinal terpenes, demonstrating that genome editing can be of benefit to the health of consumers.
In the course of doing this we aim to a> generate methods and data to allow safety assessment and informed decisions making related to genome edited crops and b> develop a blue-print for creating innovations that are in-line with both the needs and desires of all stakeholders, including the general public. Results and approaches developed in CHIC are likely also relevant for other plants and other future biotechnology programs.