" GM " Potato trials!

[SarzWix]

Quite a lot of us prefer not to buy hybrid seeds as well Open pollinated varieties are still available for most veg. Flum is actively de-hybridising some varieties of tomato.

Simon, you are most welcome - whilst some of us might not agree with GM for various reasons, deciding that from a position of knowledge is always better

[SimonJFoster]

No it isn't.....

Having looked a little further into this it seems that there is some inconsistency between the Garden Organic stance of zero copper and level of 6kg/ha/year set as acceptable by the Soil Association (and also adopted EU-wide).

All I can say is well done to Garden Organic! Modern pesticides are nothing compared to the dangers of copper.

[SimonJFoster]

Simon, you are most welcome - whilst some of us might not agree with GM for various reasons, deciding that from a position of knowledge is always better

Thanks Sarah, having had chance to look around over this forum this weekend it seems like there's a LOT of useful info to be picked up from the community here. Just wish our parish council would make some movement on providing allotments for our village!

[Bramble_killer]

Quite a lot of us prefer not to buy hybrid seeds as well Open pollinated varieties are still available for most veg. Flum is actively de-hybridising some varieties of tomato.

Simon, you are most welcome - whilst some of us might not agree with GM for various reasons, deciding that from a position of knowledge is always better

I don't really buy hybrid seeds as well. I try to garden as organic as I can but I don't manage 100%. However, as part of my job, I splice genes and overexpress or knock them down to see what the role of that gene is so sometimes, I think that perhaps some are so vehemantly opposed to something like GM is because they don't quite understand the science or they've had a bit of information without the full knowledge of it all.

I'm not picking a fight but one of the things I'm passionate about and what I do on a regular basis is communicating my science to the public (it's not GM and more on human health so perhaps people are more receptive) but it's difficult trying to stitch together a series of complicated concepts to lay persons to understand the end and final picture.

I apologise if this sounds antagonistic but I find that perhaps people are rather closed to science because popular culture has chosen the Frankenstein option.

I'm going to bow out now because I'm not an expert on GM crops.

[Flummery]

I'm not closed to science - I have a science degree but I still like to breed vegetables the traditional way and to unhybridise F1 tomatoes so I can get one I like and can save seeds from.

As to GM, as long as they don't make it compulsory ...

[Hilary B]

Sorry if this comes across as sounding a little pedantic, but the difference between breeding and using GM technologies to add in a gene is in fact very small. Breeding is in fact precisely that, adding in genes from outside, it's the whole point of breeding.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it would have been possible to breed in the resistance from the wild South American potato. However, you would then have a potato which may not be acceptable to the majority of consumers or commercial processors. Using GM you can take an accepted variety and make it blight resistant without losing any other qualities.

The outcome is the same, a variety into which the blight resistance gene has been introduced. On one hand by breeding, on the other by GM. The major difference however is that by breeding you are also introducing other unknown genes into the potato, with GM you are introducing a single known gene. If you're worried about knowing what goes into the potato, then with GM you know precisely what is going in.

If you cross breed 2 different species, you soon see whether
a) any of the hybrids are viable/fertile and
b) what you've got.
Not many features of living things are affected by only 1 gene, and not many genes affect only 1 feature.
Medicines used to be made from herbal sources. Many of the herbal sources are still around. Then clever scientists found how to make the 'pure active ingredient' in the laboratory. Side effects increased.
The impurities of the herbal source may well have mitigated against the adverse side effects.
How does anyone yet know whether adding in a solitary gene will be like the laboratory drugs, while breeding it in is more like the herbal version of the same active ingredient.
The bottom line is that 99% of GM technology is about increased profits for large businesses, and not-trusting large businesses is something most Grapes will tend to have in common!

[SimonJFoster]

If you cross breed 2 different species, you soon see whether
a) any of the hybrids are viable/fertile and
b) what you've got.
Not many features of living things are affected by only 1 gene, and not many genes affect only 1 feature.
Medicines used to be made from herbal sources. Many of the herbal sources are still around. Then clever scientists found how to make the 'pure active ingredient' in the laboratory. Side effects increased.
The impurities of the herbal source may well have mitigated against the adverse side effects.
How does anyone yet know whether adding in a solitary gene will be like the laboratory drugs, while breeding it in is more like the herbal version of the same active ingredient.

With respect to complex characteristics such as the production of bioactive compounds, you have a valid point. Modification of these pathways can require multiple genes and thus there is more scope for:

1) the pathway not to work as intended
2) for the multiple genes involved to have additional effects.

For this reason, the manipulation of such characteristics will require very thorough analysis to ensure that unintended effects do not cause harm.

However, disease resistance is a single gene characteristic and does not suffer from such problems. (by the way, it is not the case that most genes affect more than 1 feature, genes are very specific in the processes that they affect and normally have only 1 function, very rare to have more than 1)

All plants possess a battery of very effective defence mechanisms which mean that they can fight off infection by disease-causing organisms (pathogens), whether they be viruses, fungi or bacteria. These defences are hard wired into all plant genomes and include mechanisms such as production of compounds toxic to the pathogens, a 'self-destruct' mechanism whereby the plant sacrifices infected cells to ensure that the pathogen does not spread, and physical barriers that prevent the pathogen from spreading within plant tissues.

However, in order to deploy these defence mechanisms, the plant must recognise that a pathogen is trying to infect it. Plants do this using resistance genes. A resistance gene recognises a particular pathogen and then the plant responds by triggering its inbuilt defences, stopping the pathogen in its tracks. Similar in some ways to animal and human antibodies. Plants already contain hundreds of different resistance genes, this is why most plants are resistant to most diseases. And, you eat them all the time, potato already contains 180-200 resistance genes.

In our case, we have found a resistance gene in a South American potato that recognises the blight pathogen. The gene itself does not kill the pathogen, so is not toxic in any way. The potato is quite capable of defending itself as long as it 'knows' it is under attack.

Plant disease resistance genes are among the most studied genes in plants. They are known to have only one effect and that is the recognition of pathogens.

[SimonJFoster]

The bottom line is that 99% of GM technology is about increased profits for large businesses, and not-trusting large businesses is something most Grapes will tend to have in common!

Thought I'd address this in a separate post.

Whether or not anyone trusts a company or an individual is a matter of personal opinion and choice. However, the broad brush GM=profit=bad is one of those dogmas that gets rolled out all the time (friends of the earth being very fond of it).

99% of any technology, commodity, process, information etc is about profit. Farmers farm for profit, people sell produce for profit. Why should companies developing a technology such as GM not be entitled to make a profit.

It's actually a catch 22 situation. The regulatory processes for GM technology are so phenomenally high (it costs many many millions of pounds to take a GM crop through to market) that it is only possible for large companies to do it. Even if a generous soul wished to make available a GM technology for the world to use free of charge, they simply would not be able to do so because of the cost.

[zazen999]

99% of any technology, commodity, process, information etc is about profit. Farmers farm for profit, people sell produce for profit. Why should companies developing a technology such as GM not be entitled to make a profit.

Nobody minds them making a profit. What people are worried about it GM being 'outside' of the GM safety zone and potentially contaminating non-GM pollen, which in turn might stop all seeds from being open pollinated.....thus nobody being able to grow anything without the say so of Monsanto and the like.

Nobody can trust them not to 'release' GM into the wild, whilst still holding the 'patents' for seeds in their hands. Until we know how GM can be contained, if it can be - then you are going to be hard pressed to get buy-in to GM technology.

[Hilary B]

Thought I'd address this in a separate post.

Whether or not anyone trusts a company or an individual is a matter of personal opinion and choice. However, the broad brush GM=profit=bad is one of those dogmas that gets rolled out all the time (friends of the earth being very fond of it).

99% of any technology, commodity, process, information etc is about profit. Farmers farm for profit, people sell produce for profit. Why should companies developing a technology such as GM not be entitled to make a profit.

It's actually a catch 22 situation. The regulatory processes for GM technology are so phenomenally high (it costs many many millions of pounds to take a GM crop through to market) that it is only possible for large companies to do it. Even if a generous soul wished to make available a GM technology for the world to use free of charge, they simply would not be able to do so because of the cost.

Yeah, but big business is as bad as politics in having enormous scope for abuse of trust, and GM has great scope for problems. Science is too good at being sure it knows what it is doing, and from time to time, it finds out LONG after that this is not the case (thalidomide, DDT, to name just a couple of the most notorious instances). If this happens with the GM situation, it is likely to be beyond retrieval. The combination of this with the big business issue is too much for a lot of us to accept.

[Hilary B]

Further comments. In a lot of GM crops, growing them in the open is liable to mean that the altered gene DOES get spread throughout the national/international crop, just as long as ANY seed is saved from naturally pollenated sources!
Organic crops may well become a thing of the past if there is risk of pollen from GM crops getting to the plants being grown for seed, since it cannot be organic if it has GM parentage.
That is a choice that could well be denied to many, especially those who like to save their own seed.