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Na zrna se tedy aplikují živočišné buňky a nechají se rozrůstat. Finální produkt vznikne za devět až jedenáct dnů a je tužší a křehčí než klasická rýže. Varianta, která obsahuje více svalové tkáně, pak podle výzkumníků voní po hovězím mase a mandlích, zatímco primárně „tuková“ verze po smetaně nebo kokosovém oleji.

Vedle výživových benefitů by hovězí rýže měla také představovat přínos životnímu prostředí a stát se dostupnou alternativou masa. Server CNN uvádí, že ve Spojených státech nyní hovězí maso stojí v průměru 14,88 dolaru za kilogram (zhruba 350 korun) , zatímco u rýže je to 2,20 dolaru (51 korun). Hovězí rýže by pak neměla být o moc dražší.

Podle současných propočtů by kilogram stál jen 2,23 dolaru (52 korun), přičemž výživové benefity masivně překonávají pouze velmi malý nárůst ceny. Velkoprodukce takové rýže by pak mohla přispět ke značnému snížení emisí oxidu uhličitého pocházejícího z chovu hospodářských zvířat, přičemž nejvíce tohoto plynu produkuje právě skot.

Konec velkochovů?

Výzkumný tým dokonce nastiňuje teoretickou možnost, že by průmyslové chovy hovězího dobytka mohly v budoucnosti zcela zaniknout. Živočišné buňky totiž lze množit laboratorně, a při jejich dostatečných zásobách by tedy nebylo potřeba získávat je přímo ze zvířat. „Dal by se tak vytvořit udržitelný potravinový systém,“ uvedla Parková.

Nápad korejských vědců zaujal i další odborníky. Například expert na zemědělství a klima, profesor Neil Ward z University of East Anglia v Norwichi, hodnotí dostupná data velmi pozitivně, ale jako rozhodující kritérium obecně vidí skutečnost, nakolik bude laboratorně vyvinutým potravinám nakloněna veřejnost, tedy sami konzumenti.

Ale to se v nejbližší době ještě neukáže, protože hovězí rýže se v obchodech ani restauracích jen tak neobjeví. Korejští výzkumníci totiž mají naplánované další fáze vývoje, v nichž chtějí dosáhnout ještě vyšších nutričních hodnot a zefektivnit růst živočišných tkání ve struktuře zrn.

Parková však je velmi optimistická ohledně toho, že jednou by se tato hybridní potravina skutečně měla objevit v běžném prodeji a nejen tam. „Mohla by sloužit jako potravinová pomoc při hladomoru, součást vojenské stravy, nebo dokonce jako potravina při misích ve vesmíru,“ hledí výzkumnice do budoucnosti.

That discrepancy “has led to many challenges in equity,” 31 leaders of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its All of Us Research Program noted in a recent commentary in Nature Medicine.

With the aim of improving precision medicine for all, the NIH launched All of Us in 2018. So far, All of Us has enrolled more than 750 000 people from all over the US toward its goal of 1 million or more participants. In late 2023, the program began enrolling young children at a few of its partner sites as well as adults, and it plans to expand out to older children as well.

To attract a diverse population, All of Us works with more than 100 community partners, such as the Black Greek Letter Consortium, the National Hispanic Medical Association, and the National Rural Health Association, the research program’s Chief Executive Officer Josh Denny, MD, MS, noted in an interview with JAMA.

“Sometimes I feel like I can’t go anywhere without seeing a representative” of one of those partners, he said.

And, he emphasized, that’s a good thing.

“In the overall context of health, all the broad characteristics of diversity are important,” Denny, a coauthor of the recent All of Us commentary, explained. “The genetic ancestral diversity is really key.”

Besides conducting its own studies, All of Us shares its data with registered users on its Researcher Workbench, a cloud-based platform, to facilitate other research.

The latest scientific publication from All of Us, published in Nature in February, and accompanying research that used data from the program illustrate what less-diverse genomics studies might be missing.

All of Us performs whole-genome sequencing for all participants, who also contribute data from electronic health records; wearable devices; and surveys about demographics, lifestyle, and overall health.

“We have disease histories, we have medications,” Denny noted of the data collection. “Most of the resources out there don’t have any of that.” In addition, participants in All of Us provide in-person physical measurements, such as height, weight, and blood pressure.

The latest data release included genome sequences from more than 245 000 participants. About half were from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. And nearly 4 of 5 were members of groups that have been underrepresented in biomedical research not only in terms of race and ethnicity, but also age, disability, education, geography, health care access, income, and sexual and gender identity.

All of Us scientists identified more than 1 billion genetic variants, including more than 275 million that had never been previously reported. Of the newly identified variants, more than 3.9 million were in the regions of genes that code for proteins. Most of those variants won’t have any impact on disease, although some could be linked to diseases that have not yet been described, Denny said.

“More broadly, the All of Us resource highlights the opportunities to identify genotype-phenotype associations that differ across diverse populations,” Denny and his coauthors wrote in their new Nature article. For example, they noted, 1 genetic marker is strongly associated with an increased risk of type 1 diabetes and diabetic complications across ancestries, but it is also associated with an increased risk of celiac disease only in people of European ancestry.

Criticism that arose on social media about a type of graph used in the article “highlight how quickly this field of research is evolving,” Denny said in a statement issued in response.

The graph—Figure 2 in the article—is called a uniform manifold approximation and projection, which “by design, exaggerates the distinctiveness of the most frequent ancestries, a message that can be misinterpreted by the public,” Stanford University’s Jonathan Pritchard, PhD, posted on X the day the article was published.

In other words, the graph could be used to support the pseudoscientific notion that individuals in the same racial or ethnic group are genetically similar to each other, Ewan Birney, PhD, deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, told Nature.

“Race and ethnicity are social constructs yet are often conflated with genetic similarity,” Denny noted in his statement. “More work is needed to address the intersecting constructs that exist when examining self-identified race and ethnicity, genetic similarity and factors like social determinants of health.”

Participants in All of US can decline to see their results, but people who agree to enroll in the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), consent up front to receiving their results.

Those results will be delivered as polygenic risk scores. These scores “aggregate the effects of many genetic risk variants and can be used to predict an individual’s genetic predisposition to a disease or phenotype,” wrote the coauthors of a new eMERGE report that used All of Us data.

In 2020, the eMERGE Network began recruiting 5000 children and 20 000 adults of diverse ancestry for a study of genomic risk assessment. Six of eMERGE’s 10 recruitment sites aim to enroll 75% of participants from racial or ethnic minority groups or medically underserved populations; the remaining recruitment sites’ goal is 35% minority group participants.

One problem that needs to be addressed before polygenic risk scores can be used clinically is their reduced accuracy in diverse populations, according to the eMERGE article.

“Basically, they’re a reflection of the population that they’re developed in,” Niall Lennon, PhD, first author of the latest eMERGE report, explained in an interview. Lennon is director of the genomics platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; his laboratory performs genome sequencing for All of Us.

“Improved estimation of risk may also enable targeting of preventive or therapeutic interventions to those most likely to benefit from them while avoiding unnecessary testing or overtreatment,” Lennon and his coauthors noted.

Another challenge is how to interpret and communicate genetic results to patients as well as physicians. The goal of the current stage of eMERGE research “is not about creating a novel new genetic assay,” Lennon said. “It’s really about: What does it mean to return this to people?”

Niall’s team developed polygenic risk scores for 10 diseases—including asthma, breast cancer, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes—for which people could take action if they knew their risk was elevated. The eMERGE researchers used genetically diverse data from 13 475 All of Us participants to calibrate the risk scores for different ancestry groups. All of Us “recapitulates the diversity of the US,” Lennon noted.

However, “polygenic scores are not perfect either. Disease risk is a multifactorial issue,” he pointed out. “For lots of people, genetics is just one part of it. There are a whole bunch of social determinants of health.”

Type 2 diabetes is one disease for which genetics alone doesn’t explain risk.

“There’s a nuance with diabetes that not many people appreciate,” Henry Taylor, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, said in an interview. That nuance, he explained, is the complex interaction between genes and the environment. “This environmental context varies from population to population, culture to culture, city to city.”

Taylor coauthored an article about the genetic contributions to the heterogeneity of type 2 diabetes across ancestry groups, a study he called “the most diverse and largest analysis of diabetes to date.”

The study comes from the newly established international Type 2 Diabetes Global Genomics Initiative and includes data from more than 2.5 million ethnically diverse people, more than 428 000 of whom have type 2 diabetes. The ancestry of participants was about 60% European; 20% East Asian; 10.5% admixed African American from West Africa and Europe; 6% admixed Hispanic from the Americas, West Africa, and Europe; 3.3% South Asian; and 0.2% South African.

Taylor and his coauthors including Denny identified 1289 genetic markers associated with type 2 diabetes. Of those, 145, to the researchers’ knowledge, hadn’t been previously reported. They defined 8 nonoverlapping clusters of type 2 diabetes–associated genetic markers that have also been linked with diabetes risk factors such as obesity.

The authors use the clusters to generate polygenic risk scores associated with coronary artery disease, peripheral artery disease, and end-stage diabetic nephropathy across ancestry groups. “There’s a really strong association with the obesity cluster,” representing the first time that connection has been shown via genetic analysis, Taylor said.

He and his coauthors tested their scores in about 280 000 ethnically diverse individuals, more than 30 000 of whom had type 2 diabetes, from All of Us, BioBank Japan, and the UK-based Genes & Health study of people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin.

“By increasing our diversity, we are increasing complex interactions between environment and genetics that we haven’t really observed before,” said Taylor, who is working as a fellow at the NHGRI.

Participants in All of Us choose whether they want to see their genomic sequencing results, and, if so, which ones. “We do believe that people have the right not to know,” Denny said.

The program’s Hereditary Disease Risk Report includes 59 genes and variants associated with serious medical conditions upon which people can act, such as specific cancers, heart conditions, and blood disorders. About 2% to 3% of participants are expected to have a pathogenic or likely pathogenic variant, and they’re offered a free clinical DNA test conducted outside of the program, according to All of Us. Participants are also offered a Medicine and Your DNA report about 7 genes known to affect drug metabolism.

So far, Denny noted, more than 60% of participants who’ve been offered their sequencing results have wanted to see information related to their genetic ancestry, but only half of participants have wanted to see their health-related results.

‘’You could argue it could have relevance to their kids,” Denny said of the health-related results, “but their kids could join All of Us, too.”