Jennifer Doudna

So why have microbiomes been difficult to control in the past?

It turns out that microbiomes are very complex, and they're difficult to manipulate.

Antibiotics affect the entire microbiome, and their overuse can lead to drug resistance.

Diet and probiotics are nonspecific, and they're often ineffective.

Fecal transplants face various challenges to both effectiveness and acceptance.

But with CRISPR, we have a tool that works like a scalpel.

It allows us to target a particular gene in a particular kind of cell.

With CRISPR, we can change one kind of bacterium without affecting all the others.

Another challenge is that less than one percent of the world's microbial species have been grown and studied in the lab.

Fortunately, we can now access the other 99% due to the pioneering research of my colleague Jill Banfield and her breakthrough technology Metagenomics, which is a tool that allows us to figure out what species are present and what they're doing in a microbial community.

Metagenomics creates a detailed blueprint of a complex microbiome, and that means that we can use it to figure out how to use gene editing tools in the right gene, in the right organism.

You might be wondering how we can take this new knowledge and harness it to solve real-world problems.

Well, we're bringing together these two breakthrough technologies, metagenomics and CRISPR, to create a brand-new field of science called precision microbiome editing.

This will allow us to discover links between dysfunctional microbiomes and disease or greenhouse gas emissions.

We can develop modified and improved microbiome editors and show that they're safe and effective.

and then we can then begin to deploy these optimized solutions that will be transformative in the future.

So how does this affect our health and the health of our planet?

Specific microbiome compositions in livestock can actually reduce methane emissions by up to 80 percent, but doing that today currently requires daily interventions at enormous expense, and it just doesn't scale.

But with precision microbiome editing, we have an opportunity to modify a calf's microbiome at birth, limiting that animal's impact on the climate for its entire lifetime.

In human health, asthma affects up to 300 million people around the world, a number that grows by 50 percent each decade, and it disproportionately affects lower-income children.