Scientists are being given £30m to explore whether biotechnology can help some of Britain’s most vulnerable wildlife survive a changing climate.
The funding will support 14 projects looking at everything from vaccines for ash trees to gene-edited swallowtail butterflies and skin treatments for newts. The work is part of a wider £54m programme run by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, known as Aria.
Aria is a public body set up to fund high-risk, high-reward research. Its accelerated adaptation programme will investigate whether wild species can be helped to respond more quickly to threats such as rising temperatures, disease and invasive pathogens.
From ash trees to endangered butterflies
Researchers at the University of Exeter will use Crispr-Cas9 gene editing on the swallowtail butterfly, which is on Britain’s red list of endangered species. The aim is to increase its resistance to insecticides widely used on farms.
Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research centre in Hertfordshire, will investigate whether the genes of long-lived trees such as oak can be edited so they reproduce in months rather than decades. That could help scientists study how trees develop resistance to drought and disease.
At Cardiff University, researchers are working on an RNA-based treatment for ash dieback. The molecules would interfere with the fungus that causes the disease, in a process project lead Sarah Christofides compared to giving the tree a vaccination.
Another team, involving Cultivarium, Imperial College London and Queen Mary University of London, wants to engineer a naturally occurring bacterium on amphibian skin. The bacteria would produce proteins designed to stop chytrid fungus, an infection linked to population declines in more than 500 amphibian species.
Testing will stay inside secure labs
The projects are intended to work alongside established conservation measures, including protected reserves. However, none of the experimental solutions will be released into the wild during the programme, which runs until 2030.
All the teams will work in secure laboratories under an ethical policy informed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s first global policy on synthetic biology.
There are still major questions about whether these approaches can work safely and at useful scale. Chris Thomas, from the University of York, said the potential impact was likely to be modest and difficult to assess. Any future release of genetically modified organisms would also require approval from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
The initial grants cover two years. A further £24m may then be made available to projects that show promise, although Aria says the main priority remains tackling the human-driven causes of environmental change.
Why this is good news for Britain
The programme supports UK universities and research organisations while developing possible new tools for protecting native trees, pollinators and endangered species. Its cautious laboratory-first approach also allows promising ideas to be tested before any decision is made about their use in the British countryside.
