GMO Oranges? Altering a Fruit's DNA To Save It

biobricks writes "A New York Times story says the Florida orange crop is threatened by an incurable disease and traces the efforts of one company to insert a spinach gene in orange trees to fend it off. Not clear if consumers will go for it though." The article focuses on oranges, but touches on the larger world of GMO crop creation as well.

Comments

nature and consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

Nature has been genetically modifying fruit for millions of years. Genetic modifications can be good, bad, or some of each.

Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's good for you. Many natural things are quite deadly. Just because something is modified by humans doesn't mean it's bad for you. It might be! But you don't know that just because it's "genetically modified".

Re:nature and consumers

[Xicor]

certain companies that create genetically modified plants have left a bad taste in our mouths. and the problem is the government seems to support them even though they are total assholes. i dont mind the premise behind genetically modified foods... i mind the fact that companies can modify their strain of a plant to be incredibly dominant, which then spreads into other areas, giving the company grounds for a lawsuit. that being said, i think a lot of ppl dont like the idea of genetically modified foods because "humans shouldnt be playing god"... i believe they are under some misconception that there is a god playing a direct part in the evolution of plants and animals.

Re: nature and consumers

[dgatwood]

Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger.

Happens all the time between animal and bacterial species when viruses attack, and to a lesser degree with plants. A virus damages the DNA of the cell, and brings with it DNA from whatever animal or plant produced it. And there are other mechanisms that can produce similar results. See Horizontal Gene Transfer for more info.

Re:nature and consumers

[Cyberax]

Show me a wild tomato that can grow without human cultivation and is as tasty as any modern tomato.

What? You can't do it? How about wheat? Or potatoes?

ALL of our current crops are genetically-manipulated wild types that usually can't survive in the wild.

Re:nature and consumers

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Sure there are lots of scary looking methods of splicing DNA, but those are all done experimentally for research purposes. Those don't ever make it to your dinner plate.

You know the human body contains 3 complete genomes from viruses and about a hundred thousand or so incomplete ones. One of these virus genomes includes genetic material that transcribes to create a critical reproductive function that we could not live without today, and it came from some other animal. So indeed, humans themselves carry DNA from some other animal, and in fact depend on it. In fact, 8% of our genome comes from foreign sources.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/14/we-are-viral-from-the-beginning/
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/10/the-lurker-how-a-virus-hid-in-our-genome-for-six-million-years/

GMO has the potential to reduce the need for farmland, which if I were an environmentalist I would be ecstatic for because that means tearing down less forest land to create farms to feed people and end world hunger. In addition, it will make food much less expensive which means your bargaining power goes up, which means less poor people.

In commercially sold GMO, all they do is modify a very tiny number of codons to make the plant resistant to glyphosate. That's it. During natural reproduction, plants go through thousands of mutations, mutations much larger than this one, and we haven't the slightest clue what these mutations do. Yet making a small tiny change where we know exactly what it does has people like you raging? Why? Especially given that the chemical composition of the food that ends up on your plate is not chemically distinct from non-GMO based foods.

I don't know what GMO did to ruin your life, but having a vendetta against it because you're ideologically opposed to it doesn't do anybody else any favors. In fact, it does the world a disservice akin to the new rise of smallpox due to the FUD campaign against vaccines. In fact I'd say it's equally destructive.

Please stop spreading FUD about GMO. Thank you.

Re:nature and consumers

[the eric conspiracy]

Nature is full of extinction events. There is no particular reason to believe that anything that nature does will be beneficial to people; it's a wholly random thing.

The idea that nature is something uniformly beneficial is silly and naive.

Controlling the environment became the lot of man when he learned to make fire. Genetic engineering is just the latest manifestation of this.

Re:nature and consumers

[the eric conspiracy]

It does happen in nature... For example the sea slug learned to incorporate plant DNA and thereby became photosynthetic.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16124-solarpowered-sea-slug-harnesses-stolen-plant-genes.html#.UfVDwY1wqPA

The GMO head in sand types vastly underestimate the mobility of DNA in nature.

Re: nature and consumers

[Culture20]

I'm not sure that applies. Spinach copies it's DNA into a foreign host using a totally different mechanism.

Is that Volcano Bicep Syndrome you're discussing?

Re:nature and consumers

[Mike Frett]

All of you are forgetting something, very rarely these days are things done to help or save people. In todays world, if something is made, it's only because someone thinks they can make a lot of $ with it. Consequences are an afterthought.

Re:nature and consumers

[Dputiger]

"Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger."

Challenge Accepted.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23166508

Bdelloids!

Of ~29,000 matched transcripts, ~10% were inferred from blastx matches to be horizontally acquired, mainly from eubacteria but also from fungi, protists, and algae. After allowing for possible sources of error, the rate of HGT is at least 8%-9%, a level significantly higher than other invertebrates.

They haven't had sex in 80 million years. 8-9% of their genome is made up of sequences captured from all of the above sources. They've got plant DNA right in the middle of their animal DNA, and they've got the DNA of multiple other microinvertebrates mixed up in there, too. They're also enormously resistant to radiation.

I believe this satisfies your criteria. But speaking to the larger point, you need to get over the idea that your DNA is some kind of pristine paradise. It's more like a hoarder's paradise shot through with fragments of viruses, bits and pieces from other species, and vast swaths of code that don't actually *do* anything -- they're just there. The degree of genetic bloat in a species varies enormously, the Norway Spruce has a genome of some 20 billion base pairs (we have just 3 billion). We both have the same number of protein-encoding genes -- about 30,000.

Re: nature and consumers

[the eric conspiracy]

> It's taken us 100 years to realise CO2 could cause us a few problems.

Wrong. Generation of CO2 was understood to have potential for climate change LONG ago. Tyndall knew of it as early as 1862. Fourier speculated on it in 1820. Arrhenius did the first predictions of the greenhouse effect in the 1890's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect

Science is not as stupid as you seem to think. Fundamental knowledge of physics and chemistry allows prediction rather than dependence on mass experiment to see results.

Re:nature and consumers

[pspahn]

i think a lot of ppl dont like the idea of genetically modified foods because "humans shouldnt be playing god"

I presume you mean people like my grandmother? She and I had a conversation one day about assisted suicides. She's terribly Christian, and took the stance that even though this poor bastard had ALS and decided to end his days before the financial and emotional burdens became too much for his family, he was doing the wrong thing because "he was not letting God decide his fate".

Which is complete horseshit.

If he would have simply let God decide his fate, he would have passed long ago since he wouldn't have had any medication, or the ventilator, or other modern medical advancements to prop him up artificially.

I understand her argument, and why she believes in it, I just simply think it's hypocritical.

Re:nature and consumers

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Well first of all, no, I am not a paid Monsanto shill. I know, shocker. No, I'm a network engineer who recently came down with kidney disease due to a freak allergy condition, and in that process have done all kinds of research about proper nutrition (I have to baby my metabolic system as part of managing my chronic kidney disease.) In addition to that, I have a very diminished ability to work, so my wallet is tight. Therefore, I have a vested interest in nutritional food being available on the cheap.

Beyond that, I have no dog in the agriculture industry. None. I'm not invested in any company, I own no stocks, I don't work for any food related business, I don't have any friends in the business, and I don't have any relatives in the business. Zero ties, period.

First, nearly all of your claims have been pretty well established as false, especially the ones about terminator genes:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths-of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted

Do I think Monsanto is in it to end world hunger? Nope. They're in it to make money, just like any other business. However through their developments, the farmers are able to grow crops at a reduced overall cost per yield in addition to higher yields in general; in other words your food costs less and there is more of it. This is why Monsanto products are sought after. Do we use more glyphosate based pesticides? Probably. Given that we have created a situation where the plants we want are immune to them, and it kills the plants we don't want, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that we now make more of them. Why, did that surprise you? If it did, that doesn't say much about your intelligence. Glyphosate doesn't end up on our dinner plates in any significant quantities, so it's not a problem.

The organic industry hates Monsanto because now they have to compete with their prices. And it sucks for them particularly bad because organic farming has otherwise very high profit margins, but its costs will never go down, even though it is already scientifically proven to offer zero health or taste benefit over any other form of farming. You know why the costs for organic will never go down? Because it is technologically capped - i.e. there are strict limits on what kinds of technologies they can use for their farming. Worse is that the organic crops will continue to adapt to the pesticides they use, which means they'll always need to use larger quantities of them as time goes by since they can't use synthetic pesticides (which is why modern farming uses far less pesticides than organic already.)

The organic industry isn't suing Monsanto because they want to protect you from bad food, they're suing because they want to protect their revenue stream long term. How you like that one? Whole Foods is in it to make money as well. And what do you know, I don't shop there because I can't afford their food. I've found that a wal-mart strawberry tastes the same as a whole foods strawberry, only costs about half as much, so I shop there. Does that anger you? Makes me happy to be honest, because as the saying goes: A penny saved is a penny earned.

Fun fact: Since the 1950's, the food yields from American farms has increased 300% while the landmass required to produce them has only increased 12%. Not true of Organic though - organic farming requires increased landmass at a closer to linear scale. And as if that isn't enough, organic farming will continue on that trend. Contrary to popular belief, organic farming is unsustainable.

The anti-GMO movement in my mind equates to the following:

anti-vaccine movement
9/11 conspiracy theorists
moon landing hoaxers
chemtrail fearmongerers

Yes, it being anti-GMO is every bit as unreasonable and even harmful as all of the above things to me. To me there is no difference, all of these people conveniently ignore any evidence that they

Orange juice sucks anyway

[WillyWanker]

Once you understand how commercial orange juice is made I guarantee you'll never want to drink it again.

Symptom of monocropping

[AttillaTheNun]

As stated by others, this is a natural phenomenon and is only a problem for modern industrial agriculture practices, especially those based on the mass monocropping of a few select breeds to feed the world. Putting all of our eggs in a few baskets is just ignorant. An ecosystem requires diversity to survive.

This smells like a scheme to make GMO crops more acceptible to the public, suggesting only science can save the oranges and therefore we'll just have to get use to the idea of GMO crops, as if there were no other viable alternatives.

Here's an alternative - replace monocrop orchards with polyculture farms (i.e. food forest) that are based on the same principles of natural ecosystems. Their diversity is what has allowed them to survive just fine without human interaction for longer than we've been around to fuck up the works.

Re:Symptom of monocropping

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

“In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.

Not a result of monoculture:

[arielCo]

Quoth TFA:

“In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.

Deal with it: there's no all-wise Mother Nature who has arranged for the perfect harmony of all beings. Species evolve taking advantage, in spite of, or in a mutual-benefit relationship with other; and then sometimes because the other simply isn't around. Previously isolated species may meet, and whole taxa may thrive or perish.

Citrus greening disease has been around for a century across species, and it's incurable. The alternatives are 1. eradicating the pathogen (good luck), 2. eradicating the vector (even harder, and craptons of pesticides are required), 3. making the vector immune (read: genetic manipulation), or 4. making the plant immune (again, genetic manipulation). Pick your poison.

Re:Genetic Roullette

[JDevers]

I agree with your point, but to be fair Round-Up (glyphosate) is an herbicide and not a pesticide. I know, sounds like semantics, but making good arguments but messing up the details makes your point less salient. Glyphosate is also one of the safest herbicides in wide spread use, numerous studies have shown little if any long term adverse side effects and while acute toxicity is a possibility it is extremely rare and almost certainly an issue of a accidental extreme exposure. Natural resistance to glyphosate is the REAL reason to not want it used so widely. It is an extremely useful herbicide and to apply it when MANY alternatives exist because it make life easier than those alternatives is poor agriculture.

Re:And when the new orange dies?

[HiThere]

Sorry, but the big problem is monoculture. This results in an entire crop being (nearly) genetically identical. THIS results in all plants being susceptible to the same invasive organism...of course it's also what makes the taste, shape, etc. so predictable, and until the invasive organism arrives, that's quite advantageous.