Natural artificial organisms - whatever next!

December 2019

Definitions of 'transgenic':

1. containing genetic material artificially transferred from another species
2. having genetic material, in all cells, that includes a gene or DNA sequence transferred by means of genetic engineering from a genetically unlike organism.

Note the need for an artificial or engineered transfer, specifying that a human action as an essential feature.

Readers of GM-Free Scotland will be aware that genetic engineers don't 'move' genes from one species to another: they build DNA constructs using adapted, man-made DNA templates gleaned from multiple organisms plus the odd totally artificial sequence all cobbled together. The DNA creation is multiplied up in GM bacteria and then used, either to create a GM bacterial plant pathogen or to coat molecular missiles for a gene gun, which are used to force the novel DNA into the target organism.

Hornless gene edited cattle with extras

November 2019

Funny, how history keeps repeating itself.  In the early 1990s, the slow-to-rot FlavrSavr GM tomato was going to be the poster child for genetic transformation.  Its creators in Calgene, were convinced they knew exactly what DNA sequences they had inserted and touted the precision of the technology in their representations to the US Food and Drug Federation (FDA).  Interestingly, the FDA asked Calgene to prove the claim.   

The upshot was that Calgene discovered bits of DNA from the bacterial vector (Agrobacterium) had also been inserted into the GM tomato genome. 

Quarter of a century later, genetic transformation is old-hat and gene-editing is all the rage because it's precise.  So much so, that the edits deliver the same outcome as "could be achieved by breeding in the farmyard". 

Artificial fortification of Nature

June 2019

One of the first GM 'decontaminations' by activists in the UK was carried out in 1999 when two field trials of 115 GM poplar trees were trashed.

The reasons given for this action were blunt:

"those who are manipulating the DNA of trees using a very powerful but dimly understood technology, show contempt for our planet and the life it supports, including human life".

Media warnings were succinct: GM trees could lead to "a silent spring in the forests of the future".

Until the activists struck, Britain was intent on becoming a world leader in GM trees.

A healthy cure for citrus greening

June 2019

For more than ten years, a majority of orange groves in Florida have been afflicted with 'citrus greening'.  The disease has devastated millions of acres of citrus crops throughout America and elsewhere.

The visual symptoms of citrus greening include short internodes (stem length between leaves), tiny leaves, asymmetric chlorosis (loss of green colour in leaves), flowering out of season, and leaf and fruit shedding.

Trees that succumb to this disease produce fruits that are green, misshapen and bitter.  They're unsuitable for sale as fresh fruit or for juice.  Most affected trees die within a few years.

Research into citrus greening has consumed well over $540 million of funding without a single recovered orange or cured tree to show for it.

The CRISPR wrecking ball revealed

April 2019

US government information on genome (gene) editing describes it as a "group of technologies used by scientists to change an organism's DNA".

The most popular member of this group is 'Cas9', an enzyme which cuts DNA and can be designed to home in on a precise location in the genome [1,2]. Recently, a variant of this enzyme, 'Cas12a', has been developed: this seems to cut in a way that causes less disturbance at the cut ends of the DNA.

With regard to gene-edited crops, a team of Chinese scientists took a belated, close look at all the DNA changes arising in a novel rice model and what part of the technology caused them.

Avoiding unwanted genetic baggage

April 2019

The tool of choice for engineering crop plant DNA (be it transgenesis or gene editing) uses a plant pathogen, the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, as the vector.

Wild-type Agrobacterium naturally introduces its own DNA into the plant genome for the purpose of creating a gall (tumour) of plant tissue in which the bacterium can live. Genetic engineers create a GM Agrobacterium, has had its gall-inducing DNA removed and replaced with gene-editing DNA which therefore becomes inserted into the plant instead.

Despite the number of decades Agrobacterium has been in used for the genetic transformation of food and feed, and despite the recognition that such DNA insertion is error-prone, and despite the regulatory need for knowledge of the exact DNA alterations in the GM crops being assessed, the techniques for fully documenting the presence of unwanted changes have only recently become available.

CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing

March 2016

GM is changing.  Forget shooting the genome to bits with a micro-blunderbuss in the hope that the novel DNA-bullets lodge somewhere useful.  Now genetic engineers have a simple, inexpensive and remarkably effective method for making specific DNA modifications. 

The latest from biotech is 'CRISPR/Cas9', a technique which needs little training and nothing too fancy or expensive in the way of laboratory equipment, and is rapidly eclipsing all other GM methods.

Artificial horizontal gene transfer (HGT)

January 2016

"Genetically modified” or "GM" is the term settled on by politicians to describe the artificial creation of genes (genetic engineering) and the artificial change of DNA in an organism (genetic transformation). 

Even in the earliest days, GM DNA was never as simple as a single protein-coding 'gene'.  Scientists soon realised that their isolated DNA needed all manner of adjustments and extra bits if it were to work at all in its new environment, and some of their creations don't code for a protein at all but were found to alter the function of the natural genome around them in useful (to man) ways. 

For twenty years the public have been listening to claims that 'GM' is 'safe', but the proof of GM safety shifts with the tides.  And consumer distrust has continued unabated. 

The big new propaganda event of last year was the 'discovery' of a "naturally GM" food crop [1]. 

No so smart Smartstax

January 2015

Image © Greenpeace

Agapito-Tenfen et al.'s study looking at the effects of breeding GM plants together to stack multiple artificial DNA constructs into one crop [1] has thrown a very uncomfortable shadow over Monsanto's 'SmartStax' maize.

Indications from this study are that, even with only two transformation events stacked, there's reduced expression of the novel genes and significant changes in biochemical pathways such as energy-production, detoxification, cellular processes, genetic information processing, and others. If this degree of perturbation happens when only two events are stacked, what is happening in SmartStax which has eight events stacked? 

DNA fibs

April 2014

Photo from Creative Commons

The original, and biggest, fib about GM plants is perpetrated to this day.  It is the wildly inaccurate image of genetic engineers simply 'snipping' a natural gene out of one organism and popping it into another, to create a crop with a precise genetic 'improvement'.

Such genetic improvements popped into the GM plants which have been commercialised to date have been 'snipped' almost exclusively from bacterial genomes.

In the ideal biotech world, DNA is just DNA and is common to all classes of organism.  All classes of organism use the self-same gene-to-protein synthetic mechanism.  Therefore, a bacterial gene snipped out and popped into a plant will generate a bacterial protein just as it did in its native bug.  The details go something like this ...

N-Fix - too good to be true?

November 2013
 

CC photo by Wheat initiative on Flickr

The holy grail of gene technology has long been the creation of plants which can fix nitrogen from the air to provide their own nitrogen fertiliser.  Scientific and financial resources have been poured into attempts to develop such GM crops in Britain. 

There's no doubt that world agriculture desperately needs to find an alternative to our current dependence  on artificial nitrogen fertilizers.  They’re expensive, energy- and fossil fuel-hungry, climate-, environment- and health-damaging. 

Natural conversion of nitrogen gas in the air to a form usable by plants is carried out by soil bacteria.  Scientists who are aware of the complexity of nitrogen-fixation in such bacteria have reservations about whether the process can be translated by GM into higher plants.  Besides the 20 genes involved (each structured to express in bacteria not in plant cells) and the enzymes needed (some of which are assembled from separately generated components and some of which incorporate iron and molybdenum ions), the reaction itself can only take place if oxygen is excluded.  The energy costs and metabolic contortions needed to achieve such novel reactions and conditions in a plant are so extensive that achieving a robust crop at the end of the day may be a “pipe-dream” (Institute of Science in Society). 

However, researchers at Newcastle University have been following another line of inquiry.  They've come up with 'N-fix' technology. 

American fig-leaf 'regulations'

October 2011

Round hay bales of alfalfa in a Montana field, USA
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

America has no regulations with which its authorities can control GM plants. Neither the consuming public, nor the environment, nor farmers are protected from any harmful consequences of the novel plants.

You'll have heard repeated industry claims that its GM crops have been approved. This is true, but they refer to a purely voluntary process described by GM-critics as a “fig-leaf”. The only purpose of the voluntary GM approval system is to give an illusion of regulation: it suggests the government is doing its job, and lets the industry demonstrate how safety-conscious it is. It will also let industry well and truly off the hook when GM goes wrong.

How did the US administration achieve this industry-friendly, every-one-else-unfriendly set up?

Ignoring the genomic mess we're creating with GM

April 2011

In April 2005, an American opinion was published in the scientific literature stating that genomic characteristics need no longer be considered by regulators.

A team from the biotech industry and US universities suggested that, to regulate GM crops “sensibly”, the present impediments posed by costly restrictions and requirements could now be safely “modified”. The team argued that we now have “long-accepted” breeding methods, “two decades” of “experience”, an “expanding knowledge of the plant genome,” and indications that the “genetic engineering process itself presents little potential for (unidentified) unexpected consequences”. Therefore, it was reasoned that regulatory oversight need only focus on standard agricultural practice in use plus the nature of the introduced genes.

GM affects the brain

April 2011

GM crops could cause a pandemic of psychiatric disorders. How far-fetched is that?

The scientific wisdom of yesteryear held that a “blood-brain barrier” exists which protects the brain from substances and cells in the blood which would otherwise upset brain function.

There is, indeed a physical blood-brain barrier. But it can be breached. Stress and inflammation can make different areas of the barrier leaky. This allows harmful materials to pass through and disturb the function of associated areas of the brain.

Agrobacterium

April 2011

What do Agrobacterium and human beings have in common? One's a soil bacterium and the other's a primate with a very large brain: the scope for sharing anything seems limited. However, both carry out genetic transformations of other life-forms to provide food for themselves.

Put more accurately, the genetic engineers with the big brains have hijacked the gene transfer mechanism of their microscopic counterparts to provide human food.

Well done, humans!

Truth, beauty and science

March 2011

Image Wiki Commons

The Charter signed by King Charles II in 1662 for the formation of The Royal Society of London was granted in order that the whole world of letters may always recognize the United Kingdom as the universal lover and patron of every kind of truth.

Henri Poincare (1854-1912), a top French mathematician-physicist in his day, defined science in terms of beauty:

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living”.

What Poincare was taking about was

“the ultimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp.”

Genes on the move

News archive - December 2010

What do Agrobacterium and human beings have in common? One's a soil bacterium and the other's a primate with a very large brain: the scope for sharing anything seems limited. However, both carry out genetic transformations of other life-forms to provide food for themselves.

Put more accurately, the genetic engineers with the big brains have hijacked the gene transfer mechanism of their microscopic counterparts to provide human food.

Well done, humans!