GM Rice Passes Unexpected Benefits To Weeds 208
ananyo writes "A genetic-modification technique used widely to make crops herbicide resistant has been shown to confer advantages on a weedy form of rice, even in the absence of the herbicide. Used in Monsanto's 'Roundup Ready' crops, for example, resistance to the herbicide glyphosate enables farmers to wipe out most weeds from the fields without damaging their crops. A common assumption has been that if such herbicide resistance genes manage to make it into weedy or wild relatives, they would be disadvantageous and plants containing them would die out. But the new study led by Lu Baorong, an ecologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, challenges that view: it shows that a weedy form of the common rice crop, Oryza sativa, gets a significant fitness boost from glyphosate resistance, even when glyphosate is not applied. The transgenic hybrids had higher rates of photosynthesis, grew more shoots and flowers and produced 48 — 125% more seeds per plant than non-transgenic hybrids — in the absence of glyphosate, the weedkiller they were resistant to."
Re:Wait...what? (Score:5, Informative)
The notion was that traits like glyphosate resistance bear a certain cost which would be why they haven't arisen naturally and been preserved. This can be seen in antibiotic resistance in bacteria, though even there it takes many, many generations for this to sort itself out.
So, if genes cross into wild plants, the idea was that they'd cause the "contaminated" wild plants to be losers, which would self-limit the propagation of such genes in the wild. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be the case: the genes that cause glyphosate resistance are actually a win-win for the plants receiving them, meaning that they'll have a competitive advantage even without glyphosate artificially putting selection pressure on them, which means the genes will actively spread in wild plants due to natural selection.
GM Rice NOT passing to weeds (Score:5, Informative)
The headline is outright wrong and misleading. The headline implies that GM rice is passing the trait onto weeds. That is not the case here. The study has nothing to do with whether or not the traits can get passed to weeds from GM rice. The study is not saying that GM rice passed anything along to weeds. It is saying that when intentionally GM'd, the weeds get benefits other than just glyphosate resistance. The stated conclusion of the article is that if the trait got into the weed it would be bad. Duh. The thing that makes the study a bit interesting is that it challenges a previous assumption regarding why it would be bad.
Re:In the absence of glyphosate (Score:2, Informative)
In the case of Roundup, a lot of studies have been done testing the danger to human health, and it seems to be no more dangerous than manure.
Well, there have been a lot of studies run by Monsanto that seem to show that. But then there are other studies [huffingtonpost.com] that show links to Parkinson's and Autism [mdpi.com], cancer, degradation of soil nutrients [wiley.com], as well as lethal effects in amphibians [pitt.edu], and perhaps most alarming, a recent study found roundup in the urine of 44% of European Union citizens [wsj.com]. Not only that, but it seems that it is actually many of the adjucts used in Roundup applications that are being shown to have the most toxicity [organicconsumers.org], an issue most of the studies completely ignore by studying only the glyphosate, instead of the entirety of the compounds being used in such abundance.
Re:GM Goodness? (Score:5, Informative)
Did you know that truckers have to buy a different diesel fuel than non-commercial drivers? It's more expensive than the regular diesel, the only real difference other than price is the non-commercial has a dye in it so the tax collectors can identify when a driver cheaps out and buys the wrong fuel. This is just an example of where two otherwise identical products are priced differently and are required to be used for different purposes.
Re:GM Goodness? (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, the agricultural practices Monsanto has promoted have produced 'superweeds' that are also roundup resistant (funny considering how many times Monsanto has sworn that ONLY their GM technique could produce a roundup ready plant).
You're both right, sort of. The "superweeds" you refer to don't have the gene that makes RR plants RR. Roundup (glyphosate) works by inhibiting a particular enzyme, EPSPS. RR plants are different in that instead of producing that particular enzyme, they produce a different one that fulfills the same function, which glyphosate does not inhibit. Superweeds don't produce that different enzyme, they produce the typical EPSPS, except they produce enough of it so that when it's inhibited by glyphosate there's still enough to survive. They got that way through selection pressure, not from getting the gene from GM plants. Of course, there wouldn't have been that selection pressure without dumping tons of roundup on crops, and there wouldn't be dumping lots of roundup on crops if those crops weren't Roundup Ready, so that's why I say you're both sort of right.