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Hidden Viral Gene Discovered In GMO Crops
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Researchers with the European Food Safety Authority discovered variants of the Cauliflower mosaic virus 35S in the most widely harvested varieties of genetically-modified crops, including Monsanto's RoundupReady Soy and Maze. According to the researchers, Podevin and du Jardin, the particular 'Gene VI' is responsible for a number of possible consequences that could affect human health, including inhibition of RNA silencing and production of proteins with known toxicity. The EFSA is endorsing 'retrospective risk assessment' of CaMV promoter and its Gene VI sequences — in an attempt to give it a clean bill of health. It is unknown if the presence of the hidden viral genes were the result of laboratory contamination or a possible recombinant product of the resultant organism. There are serious implications for the production of GMO for foodstuffs, given either possibility."
Can't be all bad.
But is it found in non-GMO plants? We've seen latent genes from virii in many plants and animals.
The danger with GMO crops is what we don't know about gene splicing and the like. This is a prime example of my point. Despite all their supposed safe guards, genes with unknown potential have entered the food chain. This might be the next BSE in the food supply.
I'll just link to this post that explains what the news reports misunderstood. It contains quotes from the original authors of the study whose results are misrepresented here.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If GMO is so safe, why do the food-industry fight so hard to avoid labelling the products?
is knowing I can grow an entire maze with just one seed.
Is it one of them corn mazes?
This space available.
There are many questions one should ask:
* 1. Why is that viral gene in there?
* 2. Was it put there by accident or by purpose?
* 2(a). If by accident, how, when, what happened?
* 2(b). If by purpose, why, and by whom?
* 3. How come the American scientists never detected this viral gene?
* 3(a). Was it because of incompetence, or was it because the American scientists were not allowed to publish their finding, if they had found it before the Europeans?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...Will also screw those eating their products.
Seriously?
According to the source linked by TFA:
Multiple variants of the Cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter (P35S) are used to drive the expression of transgenes in genetically modified plants, for both research purposes and commercial applications.
So, right away we learn that it wasn't a "hidden viral gene". Its known and expected that P35S would be present.
A bioinformatic analysis was performed to assess the safety for human and animal health of putative translation products of gene VI overlapping P35S. No relevant similarity was identified between the putative peptides and known allergens and toxins, using different databases.
So again, nothing that might be been produced (but in fact have not been seen - hence "putative") by this gene's presence was found.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauliflower_mosaic_virus
So yes, cauliflower mosaic virus with "a full length, terminally redundant 35S RNA" exists in normal cauliflower, too. Maybe TFA has some answers but TFS fails for not answering your question, which is the first thing any of us should be asking.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
There has been an increase in the last couple decades of gastrointestinal cancers affecting younger people. So, maybe. The cause(s) of this increase in GI cancer, among the young, has not been found yet.
I'm not a tinfoil hat type who won't touch GMO because of any silly number of silly new age concerns or paranoid fantasies. But, that doesn't mean people don't have aright to know what they eat. Sure labeling won't solve problems like in TFA, but anything additional that informs consumers is a good thing. And knowing the potential pitfalls of different food choices should be a right. The current inability of shoppers in the US to know what foods are GMO means consumers have no choice. It also leads to suspicion and support to the luddite part of the anti-GMO crowd.
Labeling is the first step to educating the public on GMOs and what they provides as well as potential impacts worldwide from GMO such as increased yield (with less chemicals) on one hand, and things like genetic diversity concerns and the role of seed/pesticide suppliers and patents on the other. The reason labeling here is so opposed by the industry isn't because of some conspiracy or concern that customers will decide to stop eating their product, or radically change their diet. Americans have known what we eat and its volume are deadly and McDonalds hasn't been shut down.
Instead the reason behind non-labeling is to keep the status quo, labels on food mean questions, questions lead to competing information and the rise of the conspiracy theorist. Not having to label is just the path of least resistance. But keeping a few loud mouth idiots quiet isn't a good reason to not engage honestly with the public about a very profound change in the way we produce food, and quality to support a growing population.
1) Yes: Multiple variants of the Cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter (P35S) are used to drive the expression of transgenes in genetically modified plants
2) No its presence was not unexpected
3) Its merely a tidbit of speculation:
"putative translation products of gene VI overlapping P35S" were examined. (These have never been observed in the wild, they simply "Supposed them into being".) Upon Examining them they found "No relevant similarity was identified between the putative peptides and known allergens and toxins".
Translation, These genes have sequences that might overlap to produce other "translations" (re-combinations).
Nobody's ever seen it happen. So we had to use a computer.
We speculated all the possible outcomes from such translations.
We found nothing harmful.
No film at 11. Nothing to see here folks.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Contamination of a organisms genetics with pieces of virus DNA happens in nature ALL THE TIME. It is only because this is a GMO crop that it was tested, and found.
When the testing is finished, this may well be found to be a bit of perfectly natural, happened in the field, no-scientists-required genetic mangling.
The only difference with GM is it is done in a carefully controlled manner with a known goal, and carefully tested to determine any unwanted side effects. Random, uncontrolled genetic modification, whose consequences are totally unknowable, is completely natural.
As it is, one of the later posters linked to an article that actually looked at the research paper in question. It searched the known genomes for known toxic genomes, and found nothing. It found one possible thing that might be allergenic, looked at it further and ruled it out as well.
In the end, they found a possible cause for a GMO to be less effective - stunted growth, late flowering - and concluded that this is something that geneticists should look out for.
To finish, we have yet another study that shows how GM is completely safe. And how the media is totally untrustworthy when it comes to providing information. OH, and the article makes my point about natural virus proteins, too.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The next obvious step is to label ALL food with the exact sequence of the plant/animal. Educated consumers will then easily be able to determine the safety and even the flavorfulness of their food. Don't like that pesky CMV promoter? Don't eat it. This is a much superior proposal to the worthless "GMO" label, that only tells you if some scientist did something (no telling what). And, you'll find out what all of those changes inserted with "natural" techniques involve -- most of which are far more "interesting" than the GMO modifications. Might take some space on the label, of course, but use a small font.
There are many questions that can be answered.
In this particular case by reading The Fine Article.
Even better, TFA can point out better questions with salient answers.
Who knew?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's highly likely intentional. The CaMV 35s promoter sequence is widely used in transgenic plants to drive expression of the desired transgene.
See:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v313/n6005/abs/313810a0.html
http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/17770331/reload=0;jsessionid=SY64O3k1HZ5Ld0j3FpKq.20
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC401147/
To give a little bit of a simplified background, there are three critical elements in gene expression:
PROMOTER
TRANSCRIPTION FACTORS
GENE
PROTEIN
The PROMOTER is a genetic sequence that comes UPSTREAM of a GENE which is recognized by TRANSCRIPTION FACTORS
TRANSCRIPTION FACTORS bind to PROMOTER sequences and start the transcription of the GENE found downstream of the PROMOTER into mRNA
The mRNA of the GENE is then transported out of the nucleus to ribosomes to be translated into functional PROTEIN products
What the authors of this paper believed was that the sequence of the CaMV 35s promoter is similar to a viral protein used by many RNA viruses to protect their RNA from degradation (P6) so *IF* the CaMV promoter sequence itself is translated instead of the downstream gene (this is assumed to be possible, has not been observed) they hypothesized that it *MAY* have some functionality of the P6 protein. The odds of the CaMV promoter itself being translated into a protein are so remote that the possibility that it makes the (infinitesimal) odds that such a protein product would be functional seem astronomical be comparison. Furthermore, the authors never actually showed that the CaMV promoter is ever translated nor whether its translated product is functional, they merely compared the potential structure and sequence of the translated product to databases of known allergens and toxins and found.... nothing.
What a load of FUD.
1: Monsanto put it there
2: On purpose
2b: Monsanto put it there to control the world
3: American scientists did not test the GM crops.
3b: neither, the crops were untested.
Actually, 1 and 2 are bullshit (most likely), but if you've followed the GM and anti GM saga (or just look it up) you'll find my answers to 3 and 3b are accurate.
You think you can fool this insane luddite with your scientific doublespeak? Its a shame people write so many papers that end in a "Maybe, with so many percents of probability".
The paper says there's crap in the food. Most smart people understand this is not necessarily going to kill you.
But there's still crap in the food. Even if the next step in the scientific process hasn't been taken yet to determine what probability it has of killing you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Pottenger,_Jr.#Meat_study
While I agree that cats are not humans and the effects don't scale neccissarily because we've gone through some natural selection process with cooked foods. I think there is a lesser negative effect. The more bad shit we eat the more potentially bad end results. Industrializing the world has increased the population, but its created a proportional effect of suffering and death and B.S.
I'm not going to tell you to get back to nature and live like predator from the aliens movies. But I am going to laugh my ass off while you and your descendants get cancer infested, sterile, and retarded and enslaved by Monsanto.
Smart Luddites know slightly better and try not to consist on a diet consisting entirely of GMO produced corn chips. There's a reason for the story. You can't stop progress, but it can be tempered with some intelligent, intuitive, common sense.
-your quaint /. luddite, at least since 2000 I know there's probably a few older ones out there.
1. It's a part of a gene. It was cloned because of the promoter sequence that drives the expression of the transgene. (Viral promoters are very convinient - small but powerfull). Along with the promoter the transgenes carry a portion of a viral gene. Not sure why. Most likely because regulatory elements necessary for the promotor to work are embeded in the coding part.
2. It is on purpose. They need it to drive the expression of the gene that they put into the plants.
3. They didn't have to. They and everybody else new about it all along. I don't realy understand why it had to be "detected". It was there by design that is published in many research papers.
The paper quoted in the summary is useless junk.
Cauliflower mosaic virus infects various different plants that you eat (yes, even non-gmo "organically grown" ones) including turnips.
You already get fully formed protein VI in any of them you eat that were infected. So, this isn't something new. We've been eating the protein they're upset about for millenia at least.
The sequence for protein VI overlaps part of this 35S promoter that's used in some genetics work. It's not normally expressed (changed from DNA into the active protein) and in fact they couldn't find any evidence that it ever was.
So, they asked the question "what if" this thing we never see happen did by some miracle happen. And when they did, they still couldn't find anything that looked dangerous. But, being scientists, they said they couldn't absolutely, completely, absitively and posolutely rule out any effects on the plants themselves.
So, there you have it. The thing we never see happen, even if it did happen is the same as something that already happens all the time for the past millenia with no known ill effects.
1. Why is that viral gene in there?
When you insert a new gene (such as an herbicide resistance gene in Monsanto's Roundup Ready crops) into a plant, you also need to insert a piece of DNA called a promoter that tells the plant to turn the gene on. The scientists who created the GMOs chose to insert the promoter from the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV), as it is particularly good at this task and is very well studied. This promoter also happens to include part, but not the entirety, of gene VI from the virus.
* 2. Was it put there by accident or by purpose? * 2(a). If by accident, how, when, what happened? * 2(b). If by purpose, why, and by whom?
As stated above, the fragment of gene VI was placed into the GMOs on purpose. Because fragments of genes are generally inactive, the presence of the gene fragment is not expected to be problematic and showed no evidence of causing problems during the testing of the GMOs. Furthermore, because cauliflower mosaic virus is a naturally occurring virus, the full gene VI can be found in many non-GMO crops (for example, see this 2004 study).
3. How come the American scientists never detected this viral gene? * 3(a). Was it because of incompetence, or was it because the American scientists were not allowed to publish their finding, if they had found it before the Europeans?
These findings were not published before because we already knew that many GMOs contain a fragment of CaMV gene VI. In fact, in the Podevin and du Jardin study, the authors "found" the gene VI fragments by simply querying a database. A more substantial finding would have been if they found evidence that the gene VI fragments are actually made into functional protein (a prerequisite for the gene VI fragment to cause any deleterious effects), but this study did not investigate this issue. Rather, the study simply looked at what proteins might be produced in the worst case scenario and concluded that any possible proteins made from the gene VI fragments are unlikely to be human allergens or toxins. The authors speculate these possible proteins could be harmful to the plant itself, but because many of these GMOs are very productive plants that produce high yields in commercial settings, this possibility seems unlikely.
1) Because a virus put it there. I'm no expert on the matter, but from my knowledge genetic engineering is usually done by isolating a desirable gene, replicating it in bacteria (or virus), then having a virus with the gene insert it into the target cell. Which then develops to a full blown organism with the new gene, hopefully. Of course, it's possible that the virus could have put other junk in there. I would like to point out that detecting viral DNA in any organism is by itself no cause for alarm. Hell, our own genomes are chalked full of garbage that viruses put there. Since that garbage doesn't really affect our survival or ability to reproduce, it hasn't been 'weeded' out. Same with plants.
2)That is unknown, though unlikely on purpose. For one thing, genetic modification isn't an exact science. It is possible that the gene in question had nothing to do with a lab; Monsanto's crops come from controlled strains. As we know quite well, if there's a big genetic change in a population when it's bottlenecking, it could easily spread throughout the entire population, and retroviruses are capable of (and often do) inserting extra sequences in the genome. It probably was accidental lab contamination, or a bad reverse transcription that added more than the scientists expected.
3) Now this is getting closer to the disciple I study and work for. First off, there is no table of contents in a cell that tells you what genes are present. And there is no label on a gene that says what it is, what it does, or even if it does something useful. Now, to put it into perspective, maize (corn) has about ~32,000 genes. All full of nothing but A's, C's, T's, and G's. So it's not something you can tell a couple interns to read through and report back if something doesn't look right. So this is a job for computer programs. That can run for up to days to finish. And require trained workers to both know to look for it, as well as actually look for it. Hence stuff like this is *very* *very* *VERY* easy to slip under the radar.
[/astroturf]
Not that I'm saying Monsanto is a nice hippy company with the well-being of society as its bottom line.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
What wonderful names for researchers in agricultural field: Podevin translates from french into "pot of wine", and du Jardin translates into "of the garden"
That's so true! It's just like the Cane Toad in Australia. It has been very effective at controlling pest insects on sugar cane fields ever since it was introduced in 1935, but the nay sayers are still convinced that the toads are an invasive species that are leading to severe breakdowns in Australian ecology. The nay sayers add to the hype by claiming that the cane toads are a nuissance to areas of human habitation, or even suggesting that there are risk of children or pets being poisoned from contact with toads.
They complain about the imagined threat posed by innocent little toads, but will they admit that they would be willing to go back 80 years and raise cane without the toads? Who could possibly imagine such a world so primitive as to even attempt to raise cane without cane toads? It is totally preposterous! If they weren't growing cane, what else could they have possibly grown in Queensland?
And a warning to those of us who support GMO with our hearts, souls, and wallets: They naysayers actually succeeded in getting the Australian government to ban importation of cane toads just after the initial release until a study could be completed to show that they were harmless. Fortunately for the industry, and the economy of Queensland, the ban was lifted in 1936. The danger posed by fearmongers who do not understand modern science and technology should not be under estimated. Just think - if the naysayers had their way, maybe there wouldn't even be ANY cane toads in Queensland today.
There are many questions one should ask:
* 1. Why is that viral gene in there?
* 2. Was it put there by accident or by purpose?
* 2(a). If by accident, how, when, what happened?
* 2(b). If by purpose, why, and by whom?
* 3. How come the American scientists never detected this viral gene?
* 3(a). Was it because of incompetence, or was it because the American scientists were not allowed to publish their finding, if they had found it before the Europeans?
Here's another question you can add:
* 4. Why the fuck don't we test GMO crops for 20+ years before we start feeding them to people, and esp. children?
The answer to this and all your other questions is "we're morons, but profit is king". I'm all for science, and I realize genetcially modifying foods is what humans have always done, but never at this speed until recently. Personally I don't take drugs that haven't been on the market for at least two decades... I'd like to be able to take the same stance on GMO foods, but the lobbyists don't like the idea of giving me the information I require to make decisions regarding foodstuffs by requiring "This Contains Genetically Engineered Food" on labels.
I stay up to date on bioengineering and other life sciences, but it seems that most people don't understand that we really are fucking idiots when it comes to this stuff. It's like blindly copy & pasting huge swaths of code and changing a few numbers in a complex genetics program because it seems to have some of the results we want, but we really don't know if it has only the results we want, we don't really know what the fuck we're doing. We're like those fools who know just enough about computers to be dangerous, only instead of frying their systems we risk harming millions or billions of humans. ::sigh:: It's "patience" that's the virtue, not "patients"... If I ever tackle a problem that's beyond my power / knowledge, where I don't know exactly what I'm doing then I step back and say so, do more research, I don't just plow ahead heedlessly thinking: "What can possibly go wrong?!" then push the uncertain code into production...
I wouldn't want to eat food that's made this way!
Ugh, Humans, what a crap species: Brains just the right size to end all sentient life on the planet, and with just enough motivation to do so accidentally. There's the answer to your Fermi paradox, folks.
This is Slashdot. We hate technology and science.
They're untested you say? No they aren't.
And thats why I didn't bother to read the article, post several flames, and proceed to read the +5 informative replies that change my perspective on this virus DNA injection thing.
I still dislike Monsanto on philosophical grounds ;)
... and millions of people have died and become gravely ill because of it. You're not going to tell me that because lots of people ingested harmful chemicals and developed cancer and terrible, terrible conditions because of it, the human race as a whole should keep on ingesting (patent-able!) feedstock from a company that's so interwoven with the government that it's earned a basic degree of effective immunity for its actions.
I've had one friend die from lung complications and another deal with lifelong diabetes and a skin condition due to exposure to chemicals Monsanto and Dow were contracted to develop. I do not trust this company with turning my food into closed-source fodder made to sell RoundUp. If there were lean, open biohacking firms that were able to operate, I would support proper testing of their GMOs and I would trust the community much more than I'd trust such a vile group as Monsanto, but the fact is that the patents and legal restrictions bought off by Monsanto make that impossible.
When you insert a new gene (such as an herbicide resistance gene in Monsanto's Roundup Ready crops) into a plant, you also need to insert a piece of DNA called a promoter that tells the plant to turn the gene on. The scientists who created the GMOs chose to insert the promoter from the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV), as it is particularly good at this task and is very well studied. This promoter also happens to include part, but not the entirety, of gene VI from the virus
And from this observation--that part of a gene was left intact in order to act as a promoter to express a desired gene--TFA jumps to the conclusion that this gene could interfere with RNA silencing/human health/OMG the world is going to end. Assuming that the promoter is somehow translated into a gene product, which would be an aberration unto itself, you have to jump to the conclusion that 1) the partial gene would produce functional gene products, 2) in sufficient quantities to affect a human and 3) that they would survive digestion with enough potency to impact human health. I don't claim to be an expert, but outside of prion diseases, most food-born illnesses are bacterial because proteins and RNA don't survive the gut.
There are certainly legitimate concerns over GMO, but articles like this promote FUD in the public that you're going to get AIDS from drinking Pepsi because the high-fructose corn syrup was derived from GMO corn. I am constantly having to talk family members off the ledge because they think GMO = poison because words like "transgenic," "gene," "viral DNA," etc. sound scary when what is in fact far scarier is "Monstanto IP lawyer."
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
You know, irony is not easily understood online.
Not a virologist, but your response doesn't sound kosher. I don't see anywhere in your references, or any scientific citation linked by anyone at this site, anything at all to suggest that Gene VI insertion was at all Intentional.
I somehow doubt that it is...but, of course, that would make transgenic technology far less precise than biotechnologist would love people to believe--
which it is not.
Anyone making an analogy that we have been ingesting CaMV with veggies all along, so it must be safe--is drinking Cool Aid, We certainly weren't ingesting Gene VI in a transgenic crop carrying antibiotic resistance markers, EPSPS's, Bt, and random superfluous other pieces of DNA
Gene VI isn't just a simple protein; it has multiple functions. Since Gene VI alters RNA silencing and transactivates (http://www.pnas.org/content/86/23/9203.full.pdf) the products of each individual transgenic crop are unpredictable and unknown--could be mutant proteins, toxins, allergens or be harmless. No one knows. And anyone who tells you that they can rule out a food allergy by doing a bioinformatics search for protein homology, has never once worked with a food allergy patient, because the inconvenient truth is that the gold standard of food allergy diagnosis is a placebo controlled blinded food trial... in real life. There are no in vitro tests or homology tests that are precise enough to predict food allergy..... which is why each transgenic crop needs to be uniquely labeled with some sort of a code enabling tracing it to its specific genetic modification.
Quite, though I'm not convinced by the first link's suggestion that this could be a human health issue. As a scientist I've got to say it's not a great article, there's a rather obvious attempt to shoe horn a health scare into the analysis, to say nothing of smearing a regulatory body. (The latter in spite of a full public disclosure.)
As for the substance of the science. Yes, gene VI is toxic to plants but it's toxic when expressed inside a cell, so while it may be a danger to an infected plant it's got serious hurdles to leap before it gets expressed in a mammalian cell. I'd also note that while ribosomes are highly conserved, plant and mammalian ribosomes are not identical, so even if the protein was expressed in a human cell it's by no means certain to be functional. Moreover, it appears this isn't even the full length Gene VI, so it would by no means be functional even in plants.
At most there's a risk to the GM crop in the form of a reduced viral resistance, that's a threat to Monsanto's bottom line more than anything else.
On the whole I'm not impressed with the editorial commentary by Latham and Wilson, there's more than a whiff of axe grinding and self promotion. "Independent science news is clearly a misnomer". I hope they've written this letter to the journal in question, rather than jeering from the sidelines.
So your theory then is that we're still here, therefore nothing is dangerous?
Quite, though I'm not convinced by the first link's suggestion that this could be a human health issue. As a scientist I've got to say it's not a great article, there's a rather obvious attempt to shoe horn a health scare into the analysis, to say nothing of smearing a regulatory body. (The latter in spite of a full public disclosure.)
Though the issues are not always the same, European scientists are susceptible to the same pressures as those in the U.S.—pressures brought to bear by political and economic interests. In this case the authors of the original article—Podevin and du Jardin—are, respectively, Italian and Belgian; both are employees of publicly funded institutions. As for the source of the first cited article—Independent Science News—it must be said that though they may be "independent" in some sense, they do have an agenda. Other articles linked to on the same page include "Feds grant $500k to genetically engineered livestock research: Terminator for Animals?", "Insecticide 'unacceptable' danger to bees, report finds", "New links between pesticides & Parkinson's", "Obama Administration Snubs Risks, Moves Forward With GE Salmon Approval" and so forth. These may all be unprejudiced articles containing nothing but true statements, but they do show a certain direction of interest.
As I said, there is substantial prejudice in the European Union against all genetically modified crops. This prejudice is fueled by economic interests that want to discourage the import of cheap produce from the United States, and are reinforced by draconian regulations of the European Union and the various National Governments, as well as media propaganda.
I am personally only familiar with Germany (where I was born and still have relatives that I visit regularly), but the people here have been brought to believe that any genetically engineered plant is pretty much the same thing as poison. Germans are willing to spend extra money for food labeled as "Bio", which could be translated as something like "organic". However, the "Bio" label actually means something in the EU, unlike "organic" in the United States. Produce marked as "Bio" must conform to strict government regulations (e.g. you can raise only 12 pigs per (some unit of land I can't remember). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it shows that the entire attitude to food consumption and agricultural regulation in the EU is substantially different from that in the US.
What's unfortunate is the destructive effect of popular attitudes and governmental policies on scientific research. I doubt that it would be possible for any European scientists to publish a positive finding in regard to genetically modified crops and continue to receive any kind of public or private funds. The same is, of course, true of other "hot" buttons—such as "climate change" (Klimawechsel). The news media constantly push this issue not only as established fact, but as an imminent threat. The effectiveness of the propaganda was brought home to me when, during a conversation with a stranger—an elderly woman—at a bus stop, I chanced to remark on how much colder it is in Munich in January than in Texas. I was instantly subjected to a diatribe about Klimawechsel, and how the presence of a mere 2 cm of snow in January was a dire symptom of this threat. I did not dare disagree. It's snowed a good 12 centimeters since then; I hope she's happy. I had to shovel the snow out of my aunt's driveway...so I am somewhat less than happy.
I lament the global decline of science, though it is only one symptom of the decline of the West. Yeah, Spengler was right.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Not a virologist, but your response doesn't sound kosher. I don't see anywhere in your references, or any scientific citation linked by anyone at this site, anything at all to suggest that Gene VI insertion was at all Intentional.
The point is that the 35S promoter and gene VI overlap in the viral genome, or to put it another way the same bit of sequence has multiple functions (this is common in viruses, which tend to make very efficient use of their genetic material).The sequence in question is at about 10 o'clock in this circular genome map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CauliflowerMosaicRNA35S.png
The fine inner broken ring is the 35S transcript, and the promoter is at its 'blunt' end. This aligns with the 'sharp' end of gene VI ('TAV', in red).
If you use the promoter in a GM plant (as is commonly done) then you're inevitably also bringing along a fragment of the gene, since it's actually the same sequence. This is not the same thing as inserting the entire gene, of course, though the fragment may have some subset of the gene's multiple known functions. The DNA construct used to make the GM plants is not designed to express this fragment, but there's a possibility than once inserted in the host genome (depending on the surrounding sequence elements), the fragment could be expressed from some other promoter, making a protein that is eventually eaten by us.
Its known and expected that P35S would be present.
It is only supposed to be present in the lab, the actual crop you grown isn't supposed to have it. They use it during development only.
So again, nothing that might be been produced (but in fact have not been seen - hence "putative") by this gene's presence was found.
... in some databases. It is not certified for human consumption, and they are not scrambling to get that certification. So what TFA is saying is that on paper it looks okay but needs proper testing to determine if that is in fact the case.
Monsanto screwed up big time. They put something in our food that isn't known to be safe and that wasn't supposed to be there. The proper thing would be to destroy all affected crops and produce, but that would be expensive and Monsanto would have to pay vast compensation so instead they are just hoping that it turns out to be safe, or if not that they can bribe the relevant people.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do the same people who stridently assert that labels for GMOs are not required think the same after this?
This is probably the tip of the iceberg.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
In the last couple thousand years lots of people died because of wrong habits. Google for lead poisoning and the Roman empire, for an example.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I wish the same could be said for America, but alas, the huge Agro-Business lobby and money squashes anything even close to dissent. Hell, states now have laws that make it a felony, I believe, if you merely talk about about the food industry in print, radio or tv. Look how Oprah was attacked by the beef industry.
There is a push in the US, locally by people to try to change this attitude. I personally think it is killing us as a society, the obesity in children and oncoming storm of diabetes coming on is sign of that to me.
The trouble is...the US Federal Govt is in cahoots with big Agro-Business. We have a very small and dispappearing local farmer population, the govt funds and promotes largely the wrong kind of foods to be made cheap to the masses (why not subsidize vegetables rather than just feed corn?)..and those in charge of the Fed policies on farming and food are comprised of a revolving door for people from Agro-Business into the FDA and USDA and then back to those same industries.
I for one, am a bit scared about the mono culture they're developing for our food system. We saw a bit of the problem in the past year or so, with droughts in some regions, and ALL food prices spiked quickly. We are in danger due, IMHO, due to now having enough diversity in our food system, different strains of crops, animals...etc.
There is a movement, but it is slow going and against heavy opponents that have a lot of $$ and total influence over the government at all levels.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No 3 and 3b are not accurate.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16001857
I wish this 'Scientist don't test GMO' nonsense would stop. Seriously, you look like an idiot.
Do you know what isn't tested? non GMO food; even though there is bacteria in the soil which does gene swapping between animals and plants. OMG it all going to END!!!
Did you actually read the link you posted? It clearly indicates that testing was done by Slovenia. I'm not necessarily saying that it IS the end of the world; but I am saying the government organizations in my country that are charged with ensuring food safety have not done any tests - so we don't really know if it's safe or not. At best it is suspicious that Monsanto has not been forthcoming and pushed the government to perform such testing and publish the results. If they had nothing to hide, it would go a long way to free them of their terrible reputation.
In countries where testing has been done, there have been negative results; such as the one leading to the article we are commenting on. Imagine that.