What is Genetic Engineering?

This whole lesson is based on some basic assumptions of prior knowledge:

1. All living things are made of CELLS.
2. All cells contain directions called DNA.
3. All DNA is written in an ATGC code.

Wish we would have just done that during Genetics?

Since every living thing is written with the same code, technically we can copy and paste sections of DNA from any living thing to any other living thing just as you can copy and paste words from any document to any other document.

However, you know that you can’t just copy-paste words from any document and paste them anywhere in another one and expect it to make sense! And this is where GE gets tricky. The correct section (aka gene) must be copied from one set of DNA and pasted into the perfect location of another set of DNA to make sense. The whole process can take 1000s of tries to work.

As always, our story comes back to agriculture! Because they can’t move, plants are a real pain to keep alive long enough to make us food! Just think about it, they’ll die with:

• Not enough or too much water
• Too cold or hot temps
• Not enough sun
• Lack of nutrients
• Natural hazards
• Competing plants (weeds)
• Pests eating them

Cold Tolerant Crops

Tomatoes are famously intolerant to cold. So scientists snagged DNA from the arctic flounder and inserted it into tomato DNA to create the early tomato. These GE tomatoes to grow in a wider range of temperatures therefore increasing growing potential for the crop. Crops have also been engineered to tolerate higher temps further increasing growing seasons and locations.

Pest Resistant Crops

As seen above, insects love corn just as much as we do. But there is a bacteria that drives the pests away. So when we insert the pest resistance DNA from the bacteria into the corn DNA, we get corn that resists pests without the need for chemical pesticides and their nasty environmental side effects!

Increased Nutrition & Shelf Life

Beta carotene (aka Vitamin A) is wildly important in the development of human eyes. But its best source, the carrot, has the audacity to rot within a month of being picked. So scientists copied carotene gene from carrots into rice creating the Vitamin A packed and 20 year shelf stable Golden Rice.

Higher yield plants

A typical corn plant produces 1 ear of corn and a typical tomato plant produces about 15lbs of tomatoes. With genetic engineering, corn plants now produce 2-3 ears and tomato plants up to 40lbs. This means fewer plants, farmland and resources are required to feed more people!

Food crops are way more delicate than the weed plants that try and steal their nutrients and water. So herbicide weed killers could only be sprayed directly on the weeds until GE herbicide resistant plants were created to tolerate the chemicals. Check out the chart showing the increased use of Glyphosate herbicide since the introduction of GE crops.

Let’s say you’re extremely stop-breathing allergic to peanuts. You would avoid peanuts, peanut butter and read protein bars and cereal ingredients carefully before eating. You wouldn’t think twice about eating grapes which rarely mix with peanuts. But if a section of peanut DNA were found to help grapes grow better, you might eat an unlabeled peanut DNA laden grape and get quite sick. Scientists say that the small amount of DNA used in GE wouldn’t cause such reactions, but there are no laws requiring GMOs to be labeled so the possibility remains.