It happened to me all the time when I was falling asleep, used to give me so much panic and anxiety.

I would argue it’s the one of the most important breakthroughs in biology, ever

This is being done all over the world. The value which crop wild relatives and local crop landraces hold INVALUABLE genetic variation which can be introduced into the crops commercially grown. Especially for disease and environment stress resistances

This is massive news, I hope more are to come in the next years

Most of the plants which are labelled as GMOs are transgenic (I.e. they have had a gene from another type of plant inserted into their genome). There is nothing inherently wrong about this, however it comes with a whole load of ethical, political, and some biological implications which I won’t get into. At the end of the day, it is extremely hard to get a GMO into market (and for good reasons), so much so that not very many are actually commercially grown, and many countries ban their cultivation altogether.

A gene edited crop is one which has a bit of a gene (or genes) literally edited. Think of it like when you’re writing an essay, and you go back and change the letter of a word, as opposed to completely replacing the word and in a different font, size, and colour (which would be GMO). The good thing about gene editing technology is it just replicated what would happen in nature: a little change (in evolution we call it a mutation) in the genetic code causing an advantageous change in the organism. Gene editing basically fast-forwards this process. Because of this, governments are becoming a lot more inclined to allow crops which have been edited to be commercially grown. This technology is still relatively new, but it’s potential is seemingly limitless, so expect some big advances in crop improvement in the coming years!

TLDR: GMOs have genes from other species added to them, gene edited crops have their genes slightly altered to improve the crop’s performance.