Open-Source Technique for GM Crops

a_d_white writes "The Biological Innovation for Open Society has developed TransBacter, a new technique for creating genetically modified crops, which is being released as a BioForge project. Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source. Other techniques for creating genetically modified crops rely on Agrobacterium, but this new method allows using bacteria outside this genus. The New York Times and Wired cover the story. The founding of BIOS was mentioned previously. Although the Nature paper is available from the BIOS website, with their emphasis on the free sharing of ideas it's rather ironic that the technique was not reported in an open-access journal."

Comments

Re:Funding?

[Otter]

From the paper:

This work was supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Horticulture Australia and Rural Industries R&D Corporation (RIRDC).

Obviously, BioForge doesn't have any significant grant money.

Re:FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

"à la the GPL"

'la' already means 'the'.

Re:My own Genetics Lab

[Shannon Love]

"This crossing of the species barrier cannot normaly happen, and certainly has not been used by farmers "for centuries"."

This is incorrect. Genes hop across species lines all the time. Microorganisms routinely swap, inject and steal genes on an on going basis even across such divisions as eukaryotes vs prokaryotes. Viruses move genes between multicellular species routinely.

It has always amused me that people fear GM when for the last 100 years the standard breeding method for food crops has been to force mutate them with radiation and mutagenic chemicals. Such practices mutate thousands of unknown mutated genes for every beneficial gene they produce. Nobody ever checked if if 1/10 or 1 percent of the general population was allergic to a protein in a mutated food plant.

At least with GM, we know what we changed and where and when we changed it. With forced mutation and natural gene swapping we have no idea.

Re:My own Genetics Lab

[dr2chase]

If you manage to get a hybrid of two species, the offspring are sterile, so the strain acnnot ontinue beyond a first generation fo offspring (cf. mules).

Not so true for plants. Often the diploid offspring are infertile, but conversion to tetraploid form can restore fertility. (This is true for lilium species, at least. For mammals(at least), getting converted to tetraploid form is a bad idea.)

In addition, plant tissue culture makes the issue of fertility somewhat less of an issue, again depending on the plant. Much of the tree-borne fruit that you see in any store (apples, oranges, peaches, I think bananas), was propagated asexually (grafted onto root stock).

The scale of "conventional" techniques for improving species (e.g., plant 10 acres of pink lilies, keep the 100 best stems, crossbreed, repeat for 10 generations) is sufficiently large that I would not bet too much money that accidental gene transfer/modification (by viruses/bacteria/background radiation) isn't occurring anyway. I don't think anyone ever did any formal safety tests on the first navel orange; they saw that it was seedless and tasty enough, and propagated it all over the place.