Pakistan's National Biosafety Committee has approved major amendments to the Pakistan Biosafety Rules 2005, significantly liberalizing its genetically modified organisms (GMO) regulatory regime. The reforms aim to transition the country toward a modern, science-based, and business-friendly governance system by simplifying licensing procedures, easing import restrictions, and facilitating laboratory research.

RNA-guided programmable nucleases enable high-precision genome engineering for applications in agriculture, medicine, and biotechnology. Genome editing in biological organisms relies on a limited set of naturally occurring enzymes. Widely used nucleases such as Cas9 (Jinek et al., 2012) and Cas12a (Zetsche et al., 2015), as well as emerging effectors including TnpB (Karvelis et al., 2021; Karmakar et al., 2024a) and IscB (Altae-Tran et al., 2021),

A new study from the University of Toyama has revealed why certain varieties of the natural sweetener stevia possess a cleaner, more sugar-like flavor than others. Sourced from the leaves of Stevia rebaudiana plant, stevia can be up to 300 times sweeter than regular sugar, though some varieties leave an undesirable bitter aftertaste. The research team discovered that stevia's sweetness is fundamentally determined by specific glycosyltransferase genes and their localized, cell-specific activity within the leaf structure.