RNAi has been quietly ushered in

September 2019

While all the recent biotech limelight has been on gene editing, especially CRISPR, another older GM crop 'improvement' technique has continued to creep quietly up on us.

RNA interference, 'RNAi', which artificially alters gene expression, is still with us [1]. 

Note. RNA interference is also known as double-stranded RNA, 'dsRNA'.

Although at the time no one actually knew why, the very first commercial, fresh GMO venture, the FlavrSavr tomato, ripened abnormally slowly due to RNA interference.  GM papaya with RNAi-based viral resistance has been on some markets for a long time.  Arctic apples which don't turn brown when sliced thanks to RNAi are working their way into US shops.  GM-Free Scotland readers will be aware of Pandora's Potatoes with RNA interference to stop their bruises showing (even although the damage is still there), to stop them turning brown when fried (even although they taste like cardboard), to stop them producing the carcinogen, acrylamide (even although potatoes don't produce enough acrylamide to cause cancer), and to encourage potato growing in areas with a high risk of late blight (even if other crops could be better grown there) [2].

Many others are under development, but the blockbuster everyone's been waiting for is a commodity crop with its very own RNAi-based insecticide.  This is a radical departure from what's gone before because the artificial RNAi in the GM plant will be designed to silence gene expression in another organism in its environment.

The future of potatoes

December 2018

GM potatoes with a little extra something for everyone are wending their way into American supermarkets. To please the potato processors, these wondrous spuds don't get black spots when bruised [1]. To satisfy French fry aficionados, they don't turn brown when they're old and fried.

To coax consumers, GM relieves them of the dread threat of 'acrylamide' carcinogen in their fries [2]. To suit farmers, they promise blight-free crops. These spuds are very novel and very uniform. They come at a cost, and with more than a few risks [3].

Uncomfortable questions about GMOs

December 2018

Twenty years and two continents apart, two scientists sounded the same warning about the same GM crop. Both were mad-keen on the promises of genetic engineering, until they looked at the results of their own experiments and changed their minds. The crop which brought about this dawning was the potato [1].

In Scotland, 1998, Dr. Arpad Pusztai spoke out about the multiple adverse effects he saw in his laboratory rats fed GM spuds. In America, 2018, Dr. Caius Rommens reviewed his years of work in industry creating thousands of GMOs: he realised his "almost daily experience" was that "most GMO varieties were stunted, chlorotic (yellowed), mutated, or sterile, and many of them died quickly, like prematurely-born babies".

Rommens is now very clear that real scientists are people who love to study the natural world, not to modify it. Those who call themselves 'scientists' today spend their days staring at computer screens, generating and analysing numbers. Their focus is on imposing a controlled predictability on the capricious natural world so as to liberate society from the erratic forces of nature. Genetic engineering is not science, nor even a profession but "the expression of distorted mind-set".

Is Pandora a myth?

December 2018

'Pandora's Potatoes' might seem an odd name for a book examining the scientific reality of the GM potatoes now in American supermarkets. Its author, Caius Rommens, and creator of these very spuds, chose the name because, once he had detached himself from the biotech industry and reviewed his past work and the scientific literature, he identified concerns he simply hadn't been able to see before.

Primarily, he noticed the extent of unintended effects in his novel potatoes [1,2]. He realised his GM creations had hidden issues and, just like the contents of Pandora's Box (which should never have been opened), would unleash sickness, death and lots of unexpected evils in the world.

The second part of the book's title is even more intriguing: 'The Worst GMOs'.

Acrylamide in potatoes

December 2018

One of the hot issues in 2002 was the discovery of 'acrylamide' in food, especially in potatoes.

This wasn't good news because the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies acrylamide as Group 2A, 'probably carcinogenic to humans'. The main evidence for this is that, at high doses and in pure chemical form, acrylamide causes cancer in laboratory animals. It's linked to a whole stack of other toxic effects too, but it's the carcinogenic one that regulators struggle with most because of the difficulty in defining the actual risk and in setting a 'safe' dose.

Stay-white GM spuds

December 2018

When genetic engineer whizz-kid, Caius Rommens put his mind to enhancing the potato-experience for all spud-users from farm to factory to fork, he homed in on the annoying black patches which often sully the whiteness of the perfect potato.

The black areas are caused by the presence of a black pigment made by the potato itself, so the remedy was obvious: pop in a bit of artificial DNA which would switch off one of the genes the potato needed to create the black stuff.

Thus were born, 'Innate' stay-white spuds which don't bruise when harvested from the field, nor when they're trucked to the shops or factories, nor when they're streaming through a processing machine. Users don't have to spend time, energy and money cutting out all those black bits, and there's less waste at every level of the bruising supply chain.

All this sounds like a GM fairy-tale ending, and it might have been except that ...

A brief history of GM potatoes

December 2018

After the damp-squib of the earliest attempt to market a GM vegetable, the 'Flav Savr' tomato, all the signs were that the humble potato was going to be the real cheerleader for fresh, recognisable biotech food.

GMO MON810 maize gut rot

January 2017

Image © Greenpeace

In the late 1990s, Scotland sparked an anti-GM storm when scientists Arpad Pusztai and Stanley Ewen at Aberdeen University reported adverse effects on laboratory rats fed GM potatoes.

It's not to the credit of scientists that these preliminary, short term (10-day), small-scale (6 animals per treatment) findings were not followed up.  Instead, Pusztai was silenced, and the science of GM safety-testing was effectively stifled for 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]. 

RNAi - lite GM bug busters

December 2015

By 2020, Monsanto plans to have the first two 'RNAi' insecticidal products on the market: one is an 'RNAi' spray to  kill potato beetles, the other is an 'RNAi'-enhanced corn to kill corn rootworm.

RNA is produced by DNA and has chemical similarities.  It's role is to regulate all aspects of gene function and protein formation.  The 'i' in RNAi stands for 'interference, because the synthetic RNA molecules being developed by Monsanto  are designed to prevent the creation of proteins.  In pests, Monsanto's RNAi kills by interfering with the activity of one of the target pest's vital genes.  RNAi is also referred to as 'dsRNA' where 'ds' means 'double-stranded' and is a biotech trick used to confer stability on the normally short-lived, single-stranded RNA.  All such RNA is collectively referred to as regulatory RNA.

Monsanto's RNAi spray will be formulated to enable the pesticide to penetrate into the plant tissue, while RNAi-enhanced GM maize will produce its own RNAi pesticide.  Either way, the bugs will eat the plant plus the toxic RNAi, and get killed.

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.

Bio-P potatoes

July 2015

Non-GM potatoes. Photo Creative Commons

The latest UK Government GM venture has been announced: GM potatoes designed to satisfy consumers, farmers and food processors.

First off the planned production line in a few short years will be potatoes containing a stack of novel genes: three to combat late fungal blight, two to ward off nematode soil pests, two to switch off the production of sugars and an amino acid which together have a nasty habit of producing a toxic derivative when heated, and one to switch off the enzyme which turns raw potatoes black when they're bashed.

Future GM potatoes are planned which will have increased nutrients and which don't sprout in storage. Also under investigation are weird potatoes for industrial starch production and vaccines-in-a-spud.

Novel potatoes for biofuel production are not to be developed as these would compete for food-growing land and are not considered the socially-preferred option.

Modifying regulation

July 2014

US rally to support GMO food labelling.
CC photo by CT State Democrats on FLickr

If you've been following the news on GM foods in America, you'll have realised that an overwhelming majority of the people wants GM to be labelled. American democracy being what it is, vast sums of money are being spent by pro-labelling public-interest groups on the one hand, and a good deal more by anti-labelling industry giants on the other hand. The main result has been a tug-of-war which has served to raise awareness of the issue but resolved nothing.

 

Given the current level of information on food packages, which includes nutrients, trace nutrients, weird processed stuff, calorific values, sweeteners, and strings of additives, it's not obvious why it should be so difficult to add in the words “genetically modified”, and the industry claim that it would increase food prices is ludicrous.

 

A look at how US food regulations were bent into shape to approve one of the earliest GM offerings, 'New Leaf' potatoes, might give you an inkling of where the problem lies.  

GM potatoes no one needs

June 2014

Photo from Creative Commons

In America, 'acceptance' of GM foods has been guaranteed  by blindfolding the public.  Attempts to reveal the GM food in their shopping baskets with labelling have, so far, been brushed aside with cash.  The deep coffers of the biotech industry have enabled top-notch PR, lobbying and clever marketing to keep American consumers compliant.

With the exception of animal feed (where farmers are allowed to know what they are feeding their livestock but the end-consumer isn't), GM foods are labelled in Europe and acceptance is effectively zero.  However, the UK Government in league with ambitious scientists has found other ways of using cash to shoe-horn GM down our throats.

Using Government money (your taxes) scientists at the Sainsbury Laboratory are developing GM potatoes.

UK could 'go it alone' on GM crops

March 2013

Owen Paterson. Photo
from Creative Commons

The next stage of Westminster's grand plan to push GM crops into British fields and down British throats has unfolded (see Part 1 in A FAIRY TALE FOR CHRISTMAS - December 2012, and Part 2 in WESTMINSTER'S PRO- GM PUSH - January 2013).

Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has now begun talks with the EU health and consumer policy Commissioner to pave the way for the UK to “go it alone” on GM technology. His aim is to convince the EU that the route out of the current GM-approvals gridlock is to allow individual Member States to make their own decisions on whether to adopt GM crops. Not surprisingly, the coalition cabinet is overwhelmingly supportive of his move.

The reason, in Owen Paterson's own words, is “We can't hang around for two years before the election. Every year we delay, Argentina, Brazil and Canada are getting further ahead of us. We are mad not to seriously look at this technology.”

Happenings in Germany

February 2012

Potato field in Sweden. Photo by Skånska Matupplevelser on Flickr

German biotech giant, BASF, has announced its intention to halt development and commercialisation of all GM seeds targeted solely for cultivation in Europe.

The company's reason was:

“there is still a lack of acceptance for this technology in many parts of Europe - from the majority of consumers, farmers and politicians. Therefore, it does not make business sense to continue investing in products exclusively for cultivation in this market”.

BASF intends to:

 “concentrate on the attractive markets for plant biotechnology in North And South America and the growth markets in Asia”.

Which way is the world swimming?

September 2011

... With or against the tide?

Anti-GM protest in Berlin
Photo by cephir on Flickr

After decades of using its huge muscles to block GM-food labelling worldwide, the US has suddenly stopped swimming against the international tide (see GM LABELLING MILESTONE IN US – September 2011).

At much the same time, BASF Plant Sciences decided to pull the plug on GM development in the EU. BASF is a major GM seed developer and has been the only company to be successful in recent years in getting EU approval for a new GM crop (see EU TO CULTIVATE HOT POTATO – GMFS News Archive, May 2010). Since GM foods are just too controversial in Europe, BASF forged ahead with GM potatoes for industrial starch supply. One such potato, 'Amflora', is in the ground and another, 'Amadea', is in the pipeline. However, the GM potatoes were immediately banned in several EU Member States. Clearly, BASF has found even non-food GMOs more trouble than they're worth.

Mashing GM potatoes

June 2011

Activists blockade BASF warehouse
© Greenpeace / Christian Åslund

In the north of Sweden, biotech giant, BASF, is trying to plant Amflora, GM potatoes (for background see EU TO CULTIVATE HOT POTATO, GMFS News Archive, May 2010). The Swedes are not known for hot-blooded activism, but nevertheless, have been riled enough to block the entrance to BASF's potato warehouse. (Find out more here.)

They are particularly incensed that their government has has been openly critical of the weaknesses in the current EU GMO regulations and has asked for them to be strengthened, but at the same time has not taken any action to prevent Amflora from being cultivated in Sweden.

The activists are concerned that Amflora has been approved without sufficient independent studies, without an environmental risk assessment, without toxicity studies for animals or humans, and that the presence of an antibiotic resistance marker gene was simply ignored.

Waves of gene pollution

January 2011

A land-mark federal court case in the US in 2010 has, at last, formally recognised the existence of real dangers from gene pollution, and at the same time highlighted the irresponsible attitude of regulators and industry.