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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.
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
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 !
This is true of many things in life. It reminds me of a line from a Wendell Berry work which stuck with me, albeit not verbatim. It was something along the lines of, 'Wisdom is knowing what to do in state of ignorance.' His point was the technical knowledge we've accumulated can sometimes blind us to the possible consequences of our overwhelming ignorance in a complex universe, even as the same knowledge gives us ever greater ability to make those consequences worse.
Even if such a thought doesn't stop someone from acting, if it gives them pause long enough to find a way to act more prudently, I think it good.
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.
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. 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.
This would be useful advice for the scientists who control the delivery of GMO seed to farmers and agribusinessmen.
Oh wait... the scientists don't do that. It is the bean counters and paper shufflers who make those contracts....
GMO needs to be tightly regulated because there are too many levels where decisions are made by persons who don't have a fucking clue what their own long term best interests are. Let alone give a damn about what is best for anyone else.
Will
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.
Except, NO, it wasn't accidentally introduced, and anyone who is interested could have easily known this - it's even in the Wikipedia article for CMV!
The promoter of the 35S RNA is a very strong constitutive promoter responsible for the transcription of the whole CaMV genome. It is well known for its use in plant transformation. It causes high levels of gene expression in dicot plants. However, it is less effective in monocots, especially in cereals. The differences in behavior are probably due to differences in quality and/or quantity of regulatory factors. The promoter was named CaMV 35S promoter ("35S promoter") because the coefficient of sedimentation of the viral transcript, whose expression is naturally driven by this promoter, is 35S. It is one of the most widely used, general-purpose constitutive promoters. It was discovered at the beginning of the 1980s, by Chua and collaborators at the Rockefeller University.
This study basically just "discovered" something that has already been the basis of much of the research and industry around gene insertion in plants for 30 years. Wow.
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.
This is Slashdot. We hate technology and science.
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.
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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC