Crop GE Regulations

The challenge

Gene editing (GE) is drawing attention for the products it can produce and how they are regulated across countries. These regulations are rapidly changing around the world.

A common way to visualise these GE regulatory changes has been through coloured maps, often as screenshots from the Genetic Literacy website GE tracker, other times as figures from papers.

The Genetic Literacy website GE tracker is a fantastic resource documenting GE policy and regulatory change, but has not been updated since 2024.

In this time there have been many changes that the current site does not capture. This causes confusion for those trying to track GE regulatory changes globally - or is accompanied in a slide with a comment that the map is already out of date.

Academic publications offer another way to share regulatory maps combined with deeper analysis. However, a challenge comes in their static nature and the time demands in the review process. Put simply, there are a great many published figures, but the majority are out of date (although there is value too in capturing these moments as part of changes over time).

This site

This site is made for people who want the most up to date maps possible for GE crop regulations, and to streamline the sharing of high quality and editable versions of those materials.

Each map is shared with download links for high quality image files and editable Adobe Illustrator files. We release these files under a creative commons license but request that you consider using the attribution below. Doing so will not only help point others to these resources but increase the likelihood of people reaching out to us if an update needs to be made.

Heaton M & Ngure GM, 2026, Crop Gene Editing Regulation Tracker, cropgeregulations.com

Alongside these maps, we will routinely post:

  1. Links to papers with others GE regulatory maps.
  2. Updates of GE crop regulatory news, events and products.

Why just GE crop applications?

We're two crop scientists voluntarily doing this to help others alongside our day jobs, so we need to be efficient with our time. Currently that means focusing on GE changes in our subject area - crops.

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How to suggest an update

This space is moving quickly and it's easy for us to miss something. If you spot we're behind or you suspect a mistake, we'd love to know.

Please use the contact form if you notice an update that needs to be made or have any other questions.

Couldn't I just draw this myself

Yes, and here's a great tool to quickly do that if you want to make your own map just using your browser.

But you can also use our Illustrator files to edit the maps for your own purposes.

Team

This website is managed by: