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Insects Rapidly Becoming Resistant To GM Corn
DrHeasley writes "BT corn, which contains the DNA for Bacillus thuringensis toxin, was once hailed as the final solution for insect predators on this valuable crop. Now it turns out that insects, and evolution, are smarter than we thought, and the corn that contains the built in pesticide is no longer reliably protected."
Life finds a way
Is this a surprise, that nature can route around humans? Seriously, this was expected. However, all this means is that Monsato and other evil corporations like it who create GM seeds now have an opening for a new product to develop and sell, for an even higher price. And they will get this higher price because the "old" GM seeds are not successful any more. And the cycle continues...
Everytime we've hailed a one-shot approach to these types of problems, the same thing happens. Look at antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and the like. Do you really think this is going to be any different?
I don't know jackshit about biologic or agricultural but I have strong opinions about why this has happened, how it can be prevented, and how our farmers ought to grow the crops.
It's a common abuse of semantics in science, but you're correct. Insects aren't spontaneously becoming resistant, their descendants are being selected for resistance. The belief that major evolutionary adjustments can occur within a single lifetime is an abandoned evolutionary theory called Lamarckianism, the classic example of which is a proto-giraffe's neck stretching out to reach higher and higher leaves, and this stretchedness being passed on directly to the offspring (as if someone who becomes muscular as an adult will pass on their musculature directly to their children!) Incidentally, there actually are two evolutionary elements that function according to a Lamarckian model: epigenetics (censorship applied to DNA that can be changed in response to environmental stressors) and culture (many mammals and birds, amongst others, can pass on innovations to their offspring through teaching.) It appears that an organism that can change itself during its lifetime is preferable to one that must evolve over generations, but the good ol' nucleotide tape is stuck in Mendel mode.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Maybe marketing types. But I seriously doubt many entomologists or crop scientists were saying that this was the "final solution" to rootworm or any other pests.
In fact, they've been advising using non-bt planted in a certain number of acres near the bt ones to slow down the development of resistance.
Organic gardeners saw this coming from the get-go - I remember a Mike McGrath (then editor in chief of Organic Gardening) editorial predicting it. Heck, we'd already seen this happen with badly managed organic farms - back in the 1990s, resistance had been seen in Diamondback moths on Hawaiian farms that sprayed B.t kurstaki repeatedly rather than just when monitoring indicated a need for spraying.
The continued usefulness of organic/botanical pesticides has, in large part, been due to their lack of persistence in the environment. Inserting those genes into plants is basically making the pesticides persistent, which (obviously) leads to much quicker development of resistance on the part of the pests.
The part of me that's a cynic wonders if this is what Monsanto had in mind all along... one less organic competitor to their stable of proprietary chemicals.
#DeleteChrome
Actually, RoundUp is a herbicide (weed killer), not an insecticide (worm killer). The article is not about RoundUp, but about the toxins from Bacillus thuringensis (Bt).
You mean life is adapting to an environmental pressure? Don't these insects realise they're in breach of Monsanto's patents?
We didn't expect it to happen so quickly, that's all. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than insects: E. coli splits once every 8 hours under optimal conditions in colonies of millions of cells, and may mutate up to 0.003% of their genome with each cell division under stress. That's a lot of brute forcing power. Insects, by contrast, have much more elaborate and stringent eukaryotic mutation controls, and most species take a couple of weeks to hatch.
Which probably means that some small fraction of the population was already resistant when the "experiment" began. No need to wait for a lucky mutation. Just apply strong selection pressure and the trait quickly spreads.
Now it turns out that insects, and evolution, are smarter than we thought
Did they really just write that, really?. While we're at our peak of evolutionary misconceptions, why not sign it all away to Intelligent Design and say god wanted a better insect because it was christmas and Jebus didn't have any friends to play with.
God is only inordinately fond of beetles, not insects in general.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Your comment was so vague that either:
1) You don't know what you are talking about
2) You are delusional and think the what you just posted was offering useful information
3) You're social circles do not contain anyone who argues with you
4) etc
5) Some combination of the above
At least offer a link to a "journal" article so we know what you mean.
There are examples of epigenetic modifications of somatic cells (that increase fitness) being transferred to gametes?
While this TED talk is not talking about transfer to gametes, it indicates that exposure to different environmental factors while in the womb can have an impact on development later in life:
http://www.ted.com/talks/annie_murphy_paul_what_we_learn_before_we_re_born.html
Ask me about repetitive DNA
How is Monsanto evil in this case? One of the big reasons cited in the article for farmers abusing the BT corn is the market price of corn is very high. Not mentioned in the article is the reason why it is so high. My cousin informed me that he is going to sell off the bit of corn they don't use for cash this year. Why? The government has been subsidizing the corn/ethonal in at least three different ways, exaggerating the price. Why wouldn't a farmer plant and sell of as much as he can and cash in on the high prices? The only reason they are able to do this in the first place is the high yield of corn crops since the 1960's (150-200 bushels and acre compared to only 50/acre years ago). Would we even consider burning corn in our cars if we were not able to realize current yields? If the government wasn't distorting the price, then normal supply in demand would limit the interest in planting too much corn and flooding the market.
A couple months ago I drove Dr. Don Huber of Purdue from the airport to a field day (ag industry for product demo) being put on by my family's non-GMO seed firm in the Upper Midwest. He of course had already been hearing of this problem for a while (the plant pathology/development community is pretty small, and when something new crops up everyone is in the loop) but was (and still is) much more concerned with a different pathogen that's been cropping up slowly for the past few years at higher and higher rates. Personally, I am not a seedsman and can't explain it very well, besides saying that it's a bacteria that he has been linking to Roundup Ready plants (Roundup Ready is a gene that Monsanto inserts in all sorts of plants in order to make them resistant to a pungent herbicide, Roundup) that causes infertility in everything it touches and we're unsure of how to deal with it. This website explains the problem pretty well (ignore the activism associated with it, it should just be used as a teaching point) http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/dr_hubers_warning/
What's really chilling is that our non-GMO firm does very well outside the US. This is because most country's will not allow GMO's to be planted in their country due to their lack of long-term testing of effects on humans. I can't remember the exact regulation but in the EU they only allow something like 10-15% of their foodstock to be GMO. In Japan they're not allowed to be planted at all. My dad (the non-GMO seedsman) always likes to tell this anecdote - that when asked why they won't plant any GMO corn, the Japanese grainsman says, "We are conservative with our food. We want to see what it does to your children's children before we'll even consider it."
Glad I could help.
As Darwin himself said: "Well, *duh*. What did you expect?"
My brother is a farm manager in Iowa, and he told me that Iowa has regulations where either 10% (or 20%, I forget which) of your rows must be "refuge rows", that is, if you plant a GMO variety, you need to plant non-GMO refuge rows in the same field so that the insects (or fungus or whatever you are fighting) has some place to go live where it then should not develop resistance. Overall it is still a win, because the GMO rows are more productive, and you can plant your refuge rows on fence rows and turn-around rows that never yield as well anyway.
So... does anyone know of other states have refuge row regulations? Or is the % of refuge rows just not sufficient?
To try to get some insight on how many genetic changes there are in insects I churned a few numbers:
Multiply that and you get 10^18 insect offspring per year; a mutation rate of about 1 per individual per generation. So the number of mutations is a very large number. This means a large number of ''natural experiments'' done, one of which may result in an insect a bit more resistant to a GM crop, this will give the insect an advantage and so be able to have more offspring all of which carry the advantageous gene. So advantageous genes spread rapidy, through sexual reproduction are combined with other genes and the best combinations flourish.
WARNING: very rough calculations, most insects die before they have the chance to reproduce and so most mutations are 'lost'. The numbers that I obtained are very likely wrong - but even if each one is wrong by a factor of 100, it doesn't make a huge dent in a very large number.
built into its genes ?
and this is safe, because nothing has happened, YET ?
Insects mutated/adapted to this in just years' time. What makes us exceptions despite we are living on the same planet ?
Read radical news here
But these changes will not transfer into the descendants of the guy who was changed still in the womb unless they're exposed to precisely the same factors and change in the same way. It's not a "lasting" change like a genetic one.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
If insect evolution works like bacteria (and I don't know if it does), then if we stop growing this GM crop altogether for long enough, then insect DNA should "forget" how to defend against this toxin. Nature abhors waste, so useless genes tend to get jettisoned from the gene pool given enough generations with no selection pressure to keep them in. At least, this is what happens with antibiotic-resistant bacteria: if an antibiotic is not used at all for long enough, bacterial DNA "forgets" how to make the cell line resistant and it once again becomes vulnerable. Resistance is the reason penicillin became a lot less broadband than it originally was, and the resulting relative lack of use might mean it should become more effective again.
This of course assumes that resistant strains have not already entered the wild and become widespread. With bacteria that is particularly problematic since bacteria can transfer resistance between different types of bacteria in a contagious fashion. An GM crops also have a habit of entering the wild, in which case we will be less able to reduce the exposure of insects to that crop, which might keep their resistance maintained. Disclaimer: I am not a biologist.
I really need to get new glasses (or change default fonts) -- i read the BT corn an BT.com -- and thought why would insects need to become resistant to British Telecom??
Well, there eventually becomes a reason not to purchase that GM strain (which, if Monsanto is lucky, is near or even after the time the patent expires), but by then Monsanto should have a new strain out that produces a different pesticide in order to be effective against insects that are resistant to the pesticide produced by the old strain.
Its essentially a probabilistic form of planned obsolescence.