Mother Jones
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It’s the worst nightmare of activists opposed to genetically modified crops: An errant GMO seed blows out of a wheat or corn field and breeds with a species in the wild or on a neighboring farm. The modified gene proliferates and spreads through the population, and pretty soon the line between engineered crops and their “natural” counterparts begins to disappear, with unpredictable consequences for ecosystems.
This happened in 2010 in North Dakota, when scientists discovered that genes from genetically engineered canola—grown commercially for its oil across the state—were appearing in nearly every sample of canola taken in the wild. In that case, the “escape” of GMO canola turned out to be no big deal.
But it raised eyebrows with plant scientists about how quickly modified genes can spread. Some warned that plants engineered to be especially hardy—for example, the drought- and heat-tolerant plants that agribusiness giants like Monsanto are pushing as a remedy to climate change—could drive out native breeds, taking with them a precious store of genetic diversity.
Since the late 1970s, when genetically engineered crops began to arrive on US farms, federal and state agencies have applied a smattering of rules and regulations to prevent this from happening. But on Wednesday, a pair of new studies published in Nature offered, for the first time, a protection that comes straight from an organism’s DNA.
After several years of painstaking research, bioengineers at Yale and Harvard have developed a method to ensure organisms with engineered DNA could survive only in designated environments, and not in the wild. Their research was on the bacteria E. coli, but the scientists said the same basic steps could be applied to genetically modified crops, as well as to bacteria used to process dairy products, probiotics for health applications, and even the microorganisms sometimes used to clean up oil spills.
“Endowing safeguards now is important to allow the field of biotechnology to go forward,” said geneticist Farren Isaacs, a co-author of the Yale study.
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