On November 18, the Food Sanitation Standards Council of the Consumer Affairs Agency held a meeting of its Research Subcommittee on Newly Developed Foods to discuss the marketing of cell-cultured meats. The Japan Bioindustry Association and the Japan Association for Cellular Agriculture submitted documents calling for the promotion of commercialization of cultured meat, while IntegriCulture Inc., which is actually aiming to commercialize the product, submitted a document titled Development of Cellular Foods and Ensuring their Safety as Food. The Japan Association for Cellular Agriculture and others are calling for the creation of rules to enable the commercialization of cell-cultured foods in Japan as soon as possible. IntegriCulture Inc. has already carried out test production and sampling parties of foie gras produced by cell culture and appears to be aiming to gain approval as the first cultured meat to be produced and sold in Japan. According to the document submitted by the company, the production of cell cultured meat consists of the following four processes: 1. cell extraction, 2. preculture, 3. expansion culture, and 4. processing. Fertilized duck eggs are used for cell extraction, liver cells being extracted from the embryos. In preculture, the cells are checked for quality, then grown in culture, harvested, and finally processed to produce cell-cultured foie gras. A food production line has already been established and the company is working on test production.

The Consumer Affairs Agency has conducted a consumer opinion survey on foods derived from genome-edited crops. According to the results of the survey, in response to the question, "Do you know what genome-edited foods are?" only 6% of respondents said they did, while 94% said they did not. In the previous survey, conducted two years ago, 93% of respondents said they did not know, and thus there has been little change in public knowledge of genome-edited foods. In addition, 56% of respondents said they wanted to see labeling of genome-edited foods.
(The Japan Agricultural News 2024/11/15)

GRA&GREEN, a Nagoya-based venture company, has announced that it has obtained a patent for a technology that uses AI to manipulate the promoter regions of plant genes to increase or decrease the expression of target genes. The company has developed more than ten types of crops, including tomatoes and rice, using genome editing technology.
(GRA&GREEN 2024/11/18)

A research group from the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) and the University of Tokyo has developed new feed insects using funds from the national Moonshot R&D Program. The target insect is the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens), whose larvae grow on food residues and organic waste, making it suitable as feed for livestock in place of fish meal. The reason why the black soldier fly could not be used for feed until now was the insufficient concentration of essential amino acids. Thus, using RNA interference to intervene in the amino acid transport system, the researchers worked to develop a method to reduce the excretion function and increase the accumulation of amino acids in the insect's body.
(NARO 2024/11/1)

A research team led by Yoshinori Takashima, a professor in the School of Science at Osaka University, has announced the development of a tough biodegradable plastic by application of a unique molecular design to existing biodegradable plastics. The plastic can be melted and remolded, and as its strength remains almost unchanged, it can apparently be recycled. The plastic can also be decomposed using lipase. The research was published online in Cell Press Chem on October 30.
(ResOU 2024/10/30)

The 16th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP16), held in Cali, Colombia, has ended without a final agreement. The plenary session on the last day of the meeting, did not end on November 1 as originally planned, and no conclusion was reached until the next morning, but by that time many delegations had already departed on their way back to their countries, resulting in the meeting being inquorate and unable to reach agreement on important topics. In particular, no agreement was reached on the developed countries' share of the costs required to conserve biodiversity that had been requested by developing countries. In addition, discussions on how to evaluate the COP15 goal of halting and reversing biodiversity loss also failed to reach a conclusion and this has been held over to the next meeting. It will therefore be necessary to resume COP16 at a later date and venue to complete the agenda. At the same time, agreement was reached on the distribution of benefits from DSI (digital sequence information on genetic resources), which was one of the main issues on the agenda. It was agreed that large companies that made profits from DSI would contribute part of the profits, depending on the size of the company, to an international fund called the Cali Fund. The size of the company, the content of the contribution, and other matters will be determined at COP17.