Transgenic recipe

A food I eat a lot of is sweet potato. Many people like to classify it as a so called “superfood” (no such thing) and list out its wonderful properties. I like it because it tastes great and stores well. Only last night I tucked into a nice dish of sweet potato and chick pea curry, slightly modified from the version found on this blog: https://canalcook.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/sweet-potato-spinach-and-chickpea-curry/. Try it out, it’s good.

So three posts in to a blog about microbes and you must be wondering have I lost the plot already! Not quite.

Every now and then you will see much debate over genetically modified foods or GMOs. These are also referred to as transgenic crops, a term less tarnished by detractors. The process of making a GMO involves taking a gene from one organism and putting it into another. For food crops the overall aim can be to give them a better chance of surviving disease, to increase yield or perhaps give them a uniform appearance. Much of the argument against modifying our food claims that humans should not be interfering with nature and there are fears that what we create will destroy natural ecosystems. I don’t wish to get into a debate on this right now but I thought I would just mention a paper that has recently been published in the journal PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/18/5844.full.pdf). Here comes the microbiology.

It would appear that bacteria are already creating transgenic food. While looking at the genomes of plants that produce sweet potato, the researchers of this paper discovered that genes from a bacteria species called Agrobacterium spp. were found in a large proportion of the plants they examined. These genes have been incorporated into the genome of the plant and the plant is now expressing the genes as if they were its own. In fact, of the plants that are used to produce the sweet potatoes we eat, all the ones examined were found to have genes from Agrobacterium spp. In fact, the researchers believe that the one or more of the genes could be the reason why early humans chose to selectively cultivate the particular breed still used today.

Although the transfer of genes from bacteria to bacteria and from bacteria to some other organisms is very common it is fascinating to see an example of a transgenic crop sitting on our dinner plates without us even knowing. Of course as the researchers point out in their paper, this finding could affect how unnatural we perceive transgenic crops. Enjoy your curry.

 

 

Kudos to Nicky O’Boyle for suggesting the paper.