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Friday, November 22, 2013

What The Fox Says About GMOs

I love GMOs.

Do I love them because I chose to spend four years of college studying them? No.  Do I love them because genetics was the most incredible, eye opening, and inspiring class I ever took? Please. Do I love them because they have and continue to revolutionize the agricultural industry into a reliable and higher quality food source for a growing global population and help eliminate the overuse of pesticides, introduce more nutritious food, and help alleviate nutritionally caused/exacerbated diseases in third world countries? Don't be silly. I love GMOs because, thanks to the work of some very dedicated scientists in Russia, using the same technologies, we can now definitively and intimately know what the fox says.

Firstly, let’s get into a little terminology, what is a GMO? GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism. These can be plants, animals, bacteria, viruses; basically, anything with a genome has the potential to be a GMO.  What is universally recognized as a GMO is a product which has been specifically modified in a laboratory by a scientist in order to cause the organism to act in a certain way or exhibit certain traits. These techniques are a faster and more targeted means of accomplishing what humans have been doing for centuries, breeding.  

Breeding is a system employed long before Gregor Mendel got tired of regular monastery tasks and started writing down his observations on pea plants. Since we first began to domesticate animals and plants, we have selected the best individuals and varieties and used them to breed better and better stock. This process has led to the propagation of not only larger, more delicious, and better growing crops, but also to man’s best friend, the dog.

It is from the mystery of domestication, that Russian researcher Dr. Lyudmila Trut, draws her project. National Geographic Magazine’s article, “Taming the Wild”, by Evan Ratliff explored Trut’s project on the domestication of the Silver Fox. Since 1958, when Trut first began working on this project under Dr. Dmitry Belyaev as a graduate assistant, Trut has been working to explore the domestication of the fox and the genetic changes between domestic and wild animals, but also the phenotypic or physical and behavior presentations which differ between the creatures.

At the inception of the project, 130 foxes were gathered from fur farms in Siberia. They began breeding the animals, selecting the most gregarious from each generation in order to re-create the evolution of wolves into dogs, a transformation which began some 15,000 years ago. In just nine generations, the project had yielded foxes which not only tolerated, but craved human attention. Foxes which wagged their tails and whined in anticipation of human contact and exhibited floppier ears, curlier tails, and some piebald or spotted coloring, all considered hallmark phenotypic traits of domestication. In order to verify these breeding results the tame foxes were compared to their wild relatives, and to another group of foxes which were bred for aggression. These same results were also found in breeding studies involving rats and mink, indicating that the resulting domestication of these animals was indeed driven by genes.

Once it became clear that scientists were able to breed tame foxes, they began delving into the DNA sequence and the genomes of these animals to try to identify the gene or set of genes which distinguished domesticated animals from their wild relatives. While the hunt for the suite of fox domestication genes is still afoot, though struggling due to a lull in funding, more luck has been had in studies with chickens and dogs. Dr. Leif Andersson of Uppsala University was able to identify in domesticated chickens a mutation known as TSHR which is present only in his domestic population implying the gene plays a role in chicken domestication. UCLA biologist, Robert Wayne and his colleagues have also identified a small DNA sequence near a gene known as WBSCR17 which appears to be greatly divergent between domesticated dog and the Gray Wolf. In humans, this same gene is responsible in part for a rare genetic disease called Williams-Beuren Syndrome which results in elfin features and “exceptional Gregariousness” or an over-friendliness to strangers and an inability to recognize potential danger in unknown persons.

While these advances have provided significant insight to domestication, they have also been made possible by new genetic techniques and technologies. These same technologies which could ultimately be used to manipulate these “domesticity genes”, are the technologies used in modern GM crop development.
These same GM technologies, which allow scientist to map and view an entire genome, in addition to techniques which allow for transgenic manipulation, or the insertion of novel genes into a genome, have already proven hugely important in the Hawaiian papaya industry. In the late 1980s, the papaya crop was being decimated by PRSV (Papaya Ring Spot Virus).  With 95% of Hawaii’s crop and the industry itself in jeopardy, Dr. Dennis Gonsalves and his team turned to transgenic techniques in an attempt to save the papaya. The scientists used a “gene gun” to shoot gold particles coated in a PRSV gene into young “SunUp” papaya plants, integrating the new gene into their existing genome. Thus the “Rainbow” Papaya which is resistant to PRSV, was born.

Rainbow is able to resist PSRV because in effect it has a built in vaccine provided by the inserted genes from the virus itself. By using the virus own processes, the plant creates a protein which allows the plant to fight off a viral infection. This “immunity” has allowed the papaya crop to be rejuvenated in Hawaii, saving one of the state’s major industries form the brink of extinction. With the help of genomic mapping, the scientists working on Rainbow were able to show these exact differences in the Rainbow genome from those of the previous species. This knowledge was instrumental as the plants were studied and eventually approved by the EPA, FDA, and APHIS for production in the 1998.

GM Crop development is driven by a desire to produce a higher quality crop which could provide for a growing population. Much like the study with the foxes sought to re-create the evolutionary domestication of fox in a smaller time scale, modern GM development also seeks to create improved varieties quicker. By selecting traits such as drought resistance, enhanced nutritional value, and disease resistance, scientists can stay ahead of disease and weather trends to ensure that a needed crop is being produced on a scale which can support a growing global population.  

Years of research conducted by multiple companies, colleges, and government agencies have placed agriculture in a position to map and compare genomes and identify genes which carry different desirable traits. Modern molecular technology has opened opportunities to ensure that a crop has assured traits, making production more efficient.

While the mystery of the gene suite in Silver Fox which allows for domestication may still be unknown, the genes manipulated in GM crop production are not. So today, we will continue to enjoy the ability to plant food which will support our needs and revitalize industries with vulnerable crops, such as the papaya, and we look forward to a day when we can all enjoy man’s new best friend, the fox, chasing around our ankles with a tennis balls in their mouths, barking and yelping and telling us, just like our canine friends now, exactly what the fox says.


What Does The Fox Say?:


Works Cited/Additional Readings



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