GMO Oranges? Altering a Fruit's DNA To Save It 358
biobricks writes "A New York Times story says the Florida orange crop is threatened by an incurable disease and traces the efforts of one company to insert a spinach gene in orange trees to fend it off. Not clear if consumers will go for it though." The article focuses on oranges, but touches on the larger world of GMO crop creation as well.
Orange juice sucks anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Once you understand how commercial orange juice is made I guarantee you'll never want to drink it again.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:3, Informative)
That story is over. GMO has been in large scale production for decades now with no negative effects. The bogeyman isn't there.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to take a look at how much of your DNA you share with a banana before asking for examples of plants having animal and fish DNA
Funny that you mentioned banana's. Ever notice how banana flavoring tastes nothing like a banana that you can buy? Thats because the banana that tasted like that (the Gros Michel) were wiped out [youtube.com] by Panama Disease. We now eat Cavendish bananas, which is also at risk from the same disease.
Gros Michel [wikipedia.org]
Cavendish [wikipedia.org]
Panama Disease [wikipedia.org]
Re:nature and consumers (Score:2, Informative)
Wrong.
Go take yourself a trip to the Citrus State Park in Riverside, California, and go learn about the history of the orange, which came from Brazil.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:5, Informative)
"Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger."
Challenge Accepted.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23166508 [nih.gov]
Bdelloids!
Of ~29,000 matched transcripts, ~10% were inferred from blastx matches to be horizontally acquired, mainly from eubacteria but also from fungi, protists, and algae. After allowing for possible sources of error, the rate of HGT is at least 8%-9%, a level significantly higher than other invertebrates.
They haven't had sex in 80 million years. 8-9% of their genome is made up of sequences captured from all of the above sources. They've got plant DNA right in the middle of their animal DNA, and they've got the DNA of multiple other microinvertebrates mixed up in there, too. They're also enormously resistant to radiation.
I believe this satisfies your criteria. But speaking to the larger point, you need to get over the idea that your DNA is some kind of pristine paradise. It's more like a hoarder's paradise shot through with fragments of viruses, bits and pieces from other species, and vast swaths of code that don't actually *do* anything -- they're just there. The degree of genetic bloat in a species varies enormously, the Norway Spruce has a genome of some 20 billion base pairs (we have just 3 billion). We both have the same number of protein-encoding genes -- about 30,000.
Re: nature and consumers (Score:5, Informative)
> It's taken us 100 years to realise CO2 could cause us a few problems.
Wrong. Generation of CO2 was understood to have potential for climate change LONG ago. Tyndall knew of it as early as 1862. Fourier speculated on it in 1820. Arrhenius did the first predictions of the greenhouse effect in the 1890's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect [wikipedia.org]
Science is not as stupid as you seem to think. Fundamental knowledge of physics and chemistry allows prediction rather than dependence on mass experiment to see results.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:1, Informative)
Tomatoes were introduced to Europe when the Spanish brought them back from Mexico, so it's hard to know how many hundreds or thousands of years they've been cultivated. Pre-industrial revolution tomatoes could be grown with minimal cultivation and were much tastier than modern supermarket varieties. Until recently new varieties were developed through sexual reproduction and took many years. Sexual reproduction corrects for deficiencies that would make a plant vulnerable to disease. If you're developing a new variety for tougher skin or larger size the plant has to _also_ survive year to year.
DNA technology allows scientists to take a shortcut that has already had consequences. About five years ago a new disease called Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus was introduced here in North Carolina, as well as other states. The first year the entire crop of tomatoes rotted on the vine. Within a few years scientist at the University of NC introduced TSWV resistant varieties. These new varieties still get the disease but they survive it. I now pay ~$5 per plant rather than paying ~$5 for a flat. So what did the scientists do to develop these resistant tomatoes? It turns out that almost every heirloom variety already had the resistance. It was just the new, genetically modified varieties that had lost their resistance. So the scientists isolated the resistance gene and spliced it back into other varieties. The result is a tomatoe that's smaller, a little tougher, but resilient. And also a lot more expensive.
If we keep going down this DNA modification path we're going to eventually kill off a critical crop. If we wipe out one year's corn or wheat we're going to experience starvation on a scale larger than the potatoe famine.
Re:to the moderator who modded me down (Score:4, Informative)
From your own citation [118]: "It may be that some Roundup Ready seed was carried to Mr. Schmeiser's field without his knowledge. Some such seed might have survived the winter to germinate in the spring of 1998. However, I am persuaded by evidence of Dr. Keith Downey, an expert witness appearing for the plaintiffs, that none of the suggested sources could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality evident from the results of tests on Schmeiser's crop. His view was supported in part by evidence of Dr. Barry Hertz, a mechanical engineer, whose evidence scientifically demonstrated the limited distance that canola seed blown from trucks in the road way could be expected to spread. I am persuaded on the basis of Dr. Downey's evidence that on a balance of probabilities none of the suggested possible sources of contamination of Schmeiser's crop was the basis for the substantial level of Roundup Ready canola growing in field number 2 in 1997."
In case it isn't clear: you can't be successfully sued for accidental gene transfer.
I can't tell be sure if this is wild bluster, trolling, or stupidity - but it's likely all three.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:3, Informative)
It's more than just a vague feeling that humans should not "play god". A lot of this stuff is basically self-certified. The manufacturer does the research, devises the tests and administers them to show that it is safe for human consumption. The regulators don't have the resources to do big, long term trials and besides which the GMO companies are not willing to wait decades for the results.
Chances are most of it is fine, but as we have seen in the past with various pesticides and herbicides sometimes they get it wrong. When it does go wrong no-one is responsible and at best you are looking at decades of litigation before you see any compensation, and of course your health is ruined.
In other words people don't trust the companies involved, they don't trust the regulators and they don't trust the legal system. On top of all that we don't really need GMO in the west. If anything demand has shifted towards more natural products - normal size organic fruit and vegetables grown with minimal chemicals. Some people claim we would need even fewer chemicals with GMO but actually most of it is just making crops resistant to the particular herbicide/pesticide that the company sells so farmers can go nuts spraying it around liberally to maximize profit per square metre of land.