Non-GM foods from GM plants

2002/04/14 Orobengoa, Olatz - Elhuyar Zientziaren Komunikazioa

• Bioteknologia

Since GM plant technology emerged, we have seen a thousand advances to this day. The technology has provided virtually incredible opportunities in initial trials and has launched a multitude of new products ready to be marketed. In Europe a limit has been set a few years before its marketing. In the United States, however, many products with GM components are already on the market and are thinking about introducing more.

Transgenesis

What makes transgenic plants so special? These plants have a strange gene, belonging to another living being, which will give them special characteristics. There is a type of tomato that contains the gene of a fish or a corn that produces its own insecticide. The example of the latter is Bt corn. It contains a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringensis. This gene produces an insecticide protein that makes maize insect resistant that destroys crops.

Although they insist that the transgenesis technique will make great strides, they are receiving numerous criticisms for the effects that this new gene can have on the environment and man.

It should be noted that the technique used so far allows the appearance of the gene in all the cells of the plant, as well as in the reproductive cells. If the pollen of the transgenic plant fertilized a non-transgenic plant, it would generate a wild hybrid plant. And if technology escapes cultivated land, its control would be almost impossible. The emergence of new individuals of this type can have still unknown environmental impacts. For example, if there was a viable wild plant capable of producing insecticide itself, it would risk unbalancing its ecosystem: in addition to killing insects that feed on it, it would have a greater advantage over plants of the same non-transgenic species.

Another major problem is found in foods with GM ingredients for human consumption. As mentioned above, the new genes and proteins are scattered throughout the plant, so they also appear in the fruits, although they do not perform functions in these parts of the plant.

Several scientists believe that taking products with these molecules can cause two major problems. On the one hand, foreign genes have a component that confers antibiotic resistance, and researchers still do not know if that resistance will pass to bacteria. In this case, the current treatments for many diseases would be useless. On the other hand, the risk of new proteins being allergic to humans has been frequently mentioned. Most of them are proteins that have never appeared in the human diet so far, and it has been mentioned on more than one occasion that it is possible to produce allergic reactions.

Non-GM Foods

In order to solve these problems, a team of researchers from California has begun to develop a new technique to eliminate the gene and protein foreign to the fruits of transgenic plants. According to this technique, the new gene and protein would only appear where necessary and the other parts of the plant would be ‘clean’. To achieve this, along with the new gene that enters the plant, they have introduced another gene.

This new gene, after receiving the specific signal (which will be the chemical), expels the foreign gene and itself from the cell. In this way, this plant tissue will be ‘clean’ of foreign substances. For example, the introduction of a resistance gene against an insect that attacks the roots to a harvest plant makes its presence in the roots sufficient to protect it. Thanks to the new technique, the plant would be insect resistant, but pollen and seed resulting from the plant would be free of foreign genes.

The technique is very new and not yet fully effective. The complete removal of the foreign gene has not been achieved, and in the tests carried out so far there has always been some trace. In addition, the trial has been conducted with a single plant and researchers have stated that a specific system should be developed for each plant.

In addition to all this, even if the plant tissue gene is removed, there is a risk that the previously produced protein will be present. And since the proteins used so far degrade quite slowly, they would be preserved in both seeds and pollen once harvested. Therefore, they constantly look for genes that produce proteins that degrade faster.

Although, as we have said, the technique is very new, the money that multinationals invest in biotechnology seems to be a technique that says what it will say next. And keep in mind.

Published in the supplement Estación de Gara.