GM plants grow polio vaccines

October 2017

World-wide, polio is now a disease of the past in all but two countries. The battle has been waged with mass vaccination programmes reaching, for example, 95% of infants in Europe. Even in Pakistan and Afghanistan, polio's last stand, the annual incidence has been reducing dramatically year-on-year and is down to a few tens of cases. Indeed, conquering this virus has been one of the great success stories of modern medicine.

Glyphosate causes crop disease

June 2017

In 2003, during a 5-year study of crop disease, the first alarm was raised that wheat appeared to be worse affected by 'fusarium head blight' in fields where glyphosate herbicide had been applied just before planting. Laboratory studies at the time also indicated that fusarium grows faster when glyphosate-based weedkillers are added to the medium they're growing in.

Fusarium head blight is a devastating fungal disease which destroys a fifth of wheat harvests in Europe alone. This fungus produces 'mycotoxins' (poisons) known to cause cancer of the liver and kidney, disorders of the blood and lung, vomiting, and damage to the immune system. Anything which promotes fusarium is a serious business.

The curious case of the useless rice

April 2017

Much has been made of the philanthropic nature of GM 'golden' rice. The idea is that, as a public research project, locally-adapted varieties of the vitamin A enhanced rice will be made available free of charge to subsistence farmers in developing countries as part of a co-ordinated humanitarian effort. In this way, the yellow-coloured self-supplementing rice will be grown sustainably by those who need it most, and the widespread ill-health and blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency (VAD) will be consigned to history.

New GM insecticide

December 2016

Photo: Creative Commons

Scientists at biotech company, DuPont Pioneer, have been busy searching around in the soils of America for an alternative to 'Bt' insecticides. These pest-killing proteins, whose ancestors came from Bacillus thuringiensis soil bacteria, have proved a marvellous money-spinner for two decades. Now, pest resistance to Bt toxins is rising, and even the new generations of GM crops with stacked Bt variants look like having a limited shelf-life.

DuPont has its fingers crossed that it's found a solution. Its scientists have found a previously uncharacterised protein, designated 'IPD072Aa', which just might serve its purpose.

Healthy soil needs a diversity of life

September 2016

Photo Creative Commons

Today's scientists are cataloguing a staggering number of diverse species living in the soil. Besides the plants, animals, bacteria and fungi there's a host of much smaller microbes and single-cells organisms.

The intriguing picture emerging is of a coherent soil-world in which the diversity of life, especially the microbial forms, prevent, and sometimes cure, diseases. In this subterranean world, pathogens exist but are crowded out by the sheer variety of life around them. Plant roots orchestrate a consortium of friendly microbes around and within themselves. The soil, thus, not only provides a non-specific immune-system for the plants, but also forms an evolving protection against specific pathogens which are remembered in future years if the same pathogen emerges again.

Human efforts to engineer soil immunity by adding 'key' microbes have met with very limited success: the simple, single-pronged attack just isn't stable or comprehensive or intelligent enough.

GMO mushrooms

June 2016

Photo: button mushrooms. Adam Fagen on Flickr

As if to illustrate how simple the latest technique for gene modification is, it seems likely that Americans will be eating 'CRISPR/Cas9' [1] gene-edited 'anti-browning' mushrooms within a couple of years.

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]. 

Sweet naturally GM potatoes

July 2015

Sweet potatoes. Photo Creative Commons

A newly published study has shed a fascinating new light on the effect of crop domestication on the evolution of crop plants.

Analysis of the genome of the sweet potato revealed stable incorporation of functional DNA from a possibly ancestral species of bacterial plant pathogen, Agrobacterium rhizogenes. No such horizontal gene transfer was detected in wild relatives.

Sweet potato is one of the oldest domesticated crops and has been found in archaeological remains dating back 8,000-10,000 years.

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? 

Horizontal gene transfer is widespread

July 2014

Photo from Creative Commons

From GM day-1, there's been a culture of denial over the possibility of artificial genes moving between organisms (horizontal gene transfer).

 

Some lip-service has been paid to the danger of anti-biotic-resistance marker genes (ARMs)* moving from GM crops to bacteria in the environment to create untreatable diseases. Europe even decided to ban GM crops containing such genes, but somehow it never seems to have happened.

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. 

Frankenapples

July 2013

Non-GM apples. Photo by Scott Bauer, USDA [Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons

If you've recovered your wits after reading about the latest biotech 'healthy' GM wheat courtesy of its artificial double-stranded RNA seasoning (see FRANKENWHEAT and RNA-MODIFIED FOOD - July 2013), spare a thought for the humble apple.

Non-organic apples already have a stunning array of pesticides in and on them. Forty-two have shown up in US Department of Agriculture tests. These chemicals include endocrine disruptors and suspected neurotoxins linked to ADHD.

A major reason for the application of all these pesticides is the exceptionally narrow gene-base of the modern apple. We rely on a very few choice varieties cloned from a single parent by repeated grafting. Our apples have lost their ability to get along on their own.

As if things weren't bad enough, the latest craze is non-browning GM apples which have artificial dsRNA to add to the mix. This biotech bit blocks the production of the enzyme which causes a damaged apple to turn brown.

It's been pointed out that the browning of an apple's cut surface is an important defense mechanism against the entry of pathogens. The non-browning varieties may therefore need even more chemicals to keep them disease-free.

OUR COMMENT

No one seems to have looked to see what havoc the novel dsRNA might cause in our cells, or in our children.

There's a good case here for for buying old-fashioned apples which have been grown locally, and are organic if at all possible.

SOURCE:

• Katherine Paul and Ronnie Cummins, Frankenapple: Bad News No Matter How You Slice It, Organic Consumers Association, 17.04.13

The secret viral gene in most GM crops

March 2013

Electron micrograph of CaMV virions
Image By Patou2602 (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
via Wikimedia Commons

Fourteen years ago, the Institute of Science in Society (ISiS) issued a warning. It pointed out that the artificial genes in most GM crops are activated by a very problematic stretch of viral DNA copied and adapted from a plant pathogen, the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV).

This activator DNA, commonly referred to as the 'CaMV 35S promoter', is able to switch on genes in most, if not all, life-forms: it also has an inherent tendency to fragment and recombine with other DNA. Outside its viral-particle origins, the potential for these characteristics to promote horizontal gene transfer, create new pathogens or drive inappropriate gene expression must exist. Moreover, synthetic versions of CaMV 35S have been rejigged to boost gene expression: this increases the risk of all the above properties of the promoter.

O104:H4 - witch's brew or GM monster

August 2011

2011 O104H4 bacterial outbreak
Source Wikimedia Commons

A new strain of pathogenic E.coli, 'O104:H4', emerged in Germany in 2011. Within six weeks, the bacterium had killed 36 people, made 3,332 people ill, and left 100 with kidneys so badly damaged they face dialysis for the rest of their lives or a transplant.

Investigation quickly revealed that the DNA of O104:H4 is a witch's brew of disease-causing genes. Its genetic armory includes 33 toxins, blood-cell destroying proteins, secretions which bind the bacterium to the gut surface, inflammatory agents, a metabolic pathway which enables it to thrive anywhere (even in the absence of oxygen), and multiple resistance to normally-toxic metals, to name just a few. And added to this, the new bug has resistance to all major classes of antibiotics.