The Future of Food Biotechnology
It is difficult to predict the course of the next 20 years with respect to transgenic crops. Public acceptance may slowly increase, assuming that these plants have a continued record of human and environmental safety. It is also possible that new strategies for safety assessment will rise through the increasing research commitment to this problem.
However, consumer hostility to transgenic crops and animals may continue will into this century. Food safety is an increasingly strong source of worry for many people, and anti-biotechnology activists have successfully convinced great numbers of people that transgenic technology is dangerous when applied to food.
Other aspects of food biotechnology, such as the functional food revolution, will continue to thrive, as we learn more about the ability of specific food components to fight disease. Microbial technology will continue to be a vital economic force, despite being invisible to most of the public, and diagnostic biotechnology will continue on its course, steadily improving the food industry’s ability to ensure that food is safe and pathogen free.
Read MoreTransgenic Animals
Given the commercial success of transgenic plants, the lack of commercially available transgenic animals is surprising. There are several reasons for this. Many crops had readily identifiable problems (eg. corn and the European corn borer) that could be attacked with single genes (eg. gene that produces a protein that is toxic to the borer). Such simple problems are less common in animal production systems. For example, feed efficiency (the ability of an animal to convert feed into tissue) is tremendously important; if an animal can gain weight with less feed, the producer can reap large savings. Unfortunetely, a number of factors control feed efficiency, and single-gene solutions are unlikely. Increased animal (eg. pig) growth hormone improves feed efficiency but can also seriously affect animal health (eg. abnormal skeleton development).
Read MoreRecombinant Microbes
To date, the use of recombinant microbes in food production and processing has been limited to recombinant microbial enzymes and a recombinant hormone (bovine growth hormone;BGH) to boost milk production. Recombinant chymosin (rennet) is an example of a recombinant enzymes produced by microbes. The bovine chymosin gene was transferred to several fungal species via recombinant DNA technology in the 1980s. Recombinant chymosin is now widely used throughout the world in cheese making. Chymosin increases the rate of curd formation during initial fermentation of milk by lactic acid bacteria. Traditionally, chymosin was obtained from the stomach of slaughtered calves, but the supply from this source is somewhat unstable. In contrast, recombinant chymosin does not have this instability, because it can be produced through growth of recombinant yeasts in large bioreactors (vessels used for large-scale growth of cells).
Transgenic Plants
Breeding is still an effective mechanism for improvement and is frequently used to increase such traits as yield and disease resistance, as well as characteristic important to food processors (eg. sucrose level in potatoes) and nutritionists (eg. levels of ?-carotene in carrots). However, the great disadvantage that breeders face is the lack of control over the gene mixing that occurs during normal sexual reproduction. When a nucleus from a pollen grain fertilizers a nucleus in an ovule all of the chromosomes of the pollen nucleus are mixed with all of the chromosomes of the egg cell in the ovule. In many cases, undesirable traits are passed to the egg cell along with the desirable traits. In the mid-1970s, plant scientists were quick to see the potential of recombinant DNA technology to revolutionize plant breeding.
Read MoreGene Cloning
The major breakthrough in the development of recombinant DNA technology was the ability to clone genes. This refers to the process of isolating a specific gene from an organism’s genome (the entire set of genetic information in an organism). In general terms, genes are usually clone by inserting fragments of a genome into a vector. A vector is an agent that can be used to move DNA segments from an organism to another. Plasmids, small circular double-stranded DNA molecules that are capable of replication within their host cell, are commonly used as vectors. Once a plasmid vector has been inserted into a cell, the cell that contains the desired gene can be located and separated from cells that contain other fragments of DNA.
Read More‘Golden rice’ and its future
Soon after the ‘Starlink’ scandal, Swiss biotechnologists announced the development of ‘golden rice’, a variety of rice that has much higher levels of ?-carotene than normal rice. The human body can use ?-carotene to synthesize vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is widespread in the developing world and is the leading cause of non-infectious blindness. The most common reason for this deficiency is overreliance on rice, which is often the only food available to people living in dire poverty and to subsistence farmers in southeast Asia.
It is uncertain how effective golden rice will be in combating vitamin A deficiency, and it is not a permanent solution to global malnutrition, but it will probably lead to improvements in vitamin A nutrition of some of the world’s poor. The biotechnology industry has been quick to capitalize on golden rice, using it as an example of the potential of biotechnology to beneficially affect human society. This use of golden rice as a public relations tool has been widely criticized, especially by the developers of golden rice.
The pathway of development of golden rice has been very different from that of commercial transgenics. Funding for development came from the Swiss government and an American foundation (the Rockfeller Foundation). The developers of golden rice have always been adamant that golden rice seed would be freely available to farmers in the developing world and that they would not seek intellectual property rights for this transgenic plant. In contrast, companies such as Monsanto have successfully obtained patents for their transgenic crops, and patent rights are vigorously defended. A number of high-profile court cases in the US and Canada have demonstrated that the biotechnology industry considers intellectual property of transgenic crops to be essential.
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