BASF Moves GM Plant Research From Europe To US

there is no "Genetic Engineering" yet, only genetic tinkering and selecting

While it is true that people have been altering crops for thousands of years (in fact, some crops, like corn, wheat, broccoli, Brussels sprouts strawberries, and tangerines were pretty much created by humans), and unless you are eating nothing but foraged foods and non-cultivated species everything you eat has had massive genetic alterations made to it via human selection, however it is not true that there are no genetically engineered crops out there right now.

There are, right now (as far as I can remember anyway), a grand total of 15 genetically engineered species with 9 types of traits that have been commercially released worldwide. Genetically engineered corn, soy, canola, cotton, sugar beet, and alfalfa are allowed to be grown in the US (some of these are deregulated in other places like Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and China too). These crops have either resistance to Lepidoptera insects (the Bt traits) or tolerance to an herbicide (the epsps gene for glyphosate or the bar gene for glufosinate), or both, depending on the crop. Also, drought tolerant corn was recently approved in the US, and a soybean called Vistive Gold that has an altered oil content. Those are your major GE crops.

Then there's two minor (relatively) crops, the Rainbow papaya (the first but hopefully not last university produced GE crop to make ti to market) and summer squash, which have genes from virus coat proteins to resist the papaya ringspot virus or cucumber mosaic virus. Another virus resistant crop was recently approved in Brazil, a bean resistant to golden mosaic virus (although it will be two years IIRC before it goes into production). There used two other horticultural crops that were GE, tomatoes and potatoes. The Flavr Savr tomato had delayed ripening traits and NewLeaf potato had the Bt trait, however, while they are still approved for sale, were taken foff the market. There is, however, the Amflora potato being grown in the Netherlands. It has altered starch content and is grown for industrial starch.

The rest are even more minor and aren't actually food crops.. The Applause rose is a GE 'blue' rose (looks more purple to me, but whatever). Once, Iran grew Bt rice, but from what I can tell (and I don't have much info on this one) they stopped growing it. In China they released Bt poplars into the wild to repopulate some deforested areas. The last one is the GloFish, which is sold as a pet.

Also, there's stuff that comes from GE microbes, for example, the rennet used in cheese making often comes from Ge bacteria.

So, that's what is currently (or was at one point) genetically engineered. There are plenty of GE crops in development or awaiting approval though, from Golden Rice to BioCassava to Arctic apples to Enviropig to 2,4-D resistant corn, and there's lots of promising research into other traits like fungus resistance and delayed ripening (food spoilage is a major problem in developing countries), so it isn't just limited to these plants and these traits. Unfortunately, overly strict regulations and general opposition & ignorance prevent the technology from being further utilized.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/0xggqn-_Y-k/basf-moves-gm-plant-research-from-europe-to-us

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