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Agricultural Biotechnology: a World of Potential Contents Welcome to the Issue! Planting for a Brighter Future Agricultural Biotechnology: A World of Potential Contents Welcome to the Issue! Planting for a Brighter Future . 3 Career Profile: Farmer . 11 A Growing Field Wide World of Biotechnology . 12 In this issue of Your World, we look at agriculture biotech Kids + Teachers . 14 crops—the science involved, the benefits possible, and the More Resources . 16 concerns people have toward them. All over the world, farmers are choosing to plant modified crops to earn more money with their harvest. Biotech crops are helping with other goals, too, particularly to protect the environment. The Biotechnology Institute is an independent, national, nonprofit Crops developed by plant scientists with biotechnology are making organization dedicated to education and research about the present it possible to farm on land that has been unsuited for cultivation, to and future impact of biotechnology. Our mission is to engage, produce food with increased nutritional value, to make it possible excite, and educate the public, particularly young people, about for farmers to leave rain forests alone, and to reduce applications biotechnology and its immense potential for solving human of chemicals to fields. health, food, and environmental problems. Your World is the If you care about food and the environment, a career in agricultural premier biotechnology publication for 7th-to 12th-grade students. biotechnology may be for you. YOUR WORLD Vol. 18, No. 1 Fall 2009 Sincerely, Publisher The Biotechnology Institute Editor Jeff Ghannam Managing Editor Lois M. Baron Paul A. Hanle Graphic Design Diahann Hill President Special Advisory Group Biotechnology Institute CropLife International W. Seth Horne, PhD, Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh Pamela C. Ronald, PhD, Professor, Plant Pathology, University of California–Davis Advisory Board Don DeRosa, EdD, CityLab, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA Lori Dodson, PhD, North Montco Technical Career Center, Landsdale, PA Lucinda (Cindy) Elliott, PhD, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA Mark Temons, Muncy Junior/Senior High School, Muncy, PA Acknowledgments The Biotechnology Institute would like to thank the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Association, which originally developed Your World, and Jeff Alan Davidson, founding editor. Photo Credits For More Information If no credit is given for a photograph, it is a stock or company photo. Biotechnology Institute p. 2: These blue seeds will produce biotech corn. 2000 N. 14th Street, Suite 700 p. 6: Enclosures like this in the Philippines are used for growing Arlington, VA 22201 Golden Rice and drought-resistant rice strains (Deb Carstoiu/ [email protected] CropLife Asia). Phone: 703-248-8681 Fax: 703-248-8687 p. 7: Arabidopsis thaliana (Annkatrin Rose, Appalachian State © 2009 Biotechnology Institute. All rights reserved. University). LEAD SPONSOR p. 10: Left photo: Scientist screening plants in a greenhouse in Germany (copyright © BASF). Right photo: Men compare yield between Bt corn and traditional corn (AfricaBio). p. 11: Soweto farmer Motlatsi Musi (AfricaBio). p. 12: Computer model of peptide molecules (W. Seth Horne). p. 15: Art from the report cover (Batelle). SPONSOR p. 16: Sterile papaya plantlets in the Philippines (Deb Carstoiu/CropLife Asia). The Biotechnology Institute acknowledges with deep gratitude the financial support of Johnson & Johnson. ADDITIONAL SUPPORT Dow AgroSciences and Syngenta 2 Your World Take a quick quiz to check your biotech crop IQ. Decide whether each of these statements is true or false. Read the article to see if you’re right. (Or for instant gratification, answers are at the bottom of page 15.) Planting for a Brighter Future Think people ought to leave things alone? A lot of the food we eat today would be unrecognizable if no one had harnessed the potential of what they found in the wild. Corn, for example, comes from an ancient plant called teosinte. Originally grown in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, it produced a seed-stalk with only a few small, hard kernels on it. For hundreds of years, farmers mixed and matched the seeds they sowed to improve their crops—as a result, we now have corn that produces an ear full of tender kernels. This method of crossing plants takes time because you have to grow out each plant to determine if it is better than the original. With modern science, we can now add, subtract, and change the genetic code of plants, in addition to using By Joene Hendry, traditional plant-breeding methods. Most of the corn you a freelance writer. Her eat today has been changed by humans into hybrid or favorite topics include biotech-derived varieties to provide a wide range of benefits, medical news, health including improved taste and nutrition for consumers and and lifestyle topics, higher yields and income for farmers. and gardening. Your World 3 Back in the Day tarting out, people used simple we want, keep out characteristics we don’t want, or produce crops reliably. Biotechnology Sselection to breed plants—sav- is helping plant scientists reach the goal of improved crops. ing favorite seeds from one growing Studying the genes that make up every living organism gives researchers a constant season to the next. Then breeders stream of new information about how plants grow and ways to choose characteristics started cross-pollinating and grafting to leave in and leave out. plants (grafting is splicing pieces of Scientists can now transfer desirable traits that offer special benefits to farmers and two plants together so they grow as consumers from one plant to another, leaving behind unwanted traits. They can change one). Breeders commonly graft cit- the sequence in a plant’s unique living code, called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), to rus, peaches, walnuts, and grapes and tweak a rice gene so it will flower earlier, for example, or a spinach gene so it will flower tissue culture strawberries, potatoes, later. Scientists use marker-assisted selection (MAS) to identify desirable genes in one and garlic to meet the growing plant variety for transfer to another variety of the same plant, such as corn to corn, demand for food crops. thereby improving how it grows or how much it produces. It has taken a lot of generations— They have even learned how to transfer genes from another species into a plant’s of plants and people—to get tastier, DNA so the plants can protect themselves against insects, disease, and poor growing healthier crops that are easier to conditions, such as drought and fields flooded with saltwater. People often use the term grow. Sometimes, these methods still genetic engineering (GE) or genetic modification (GM) to describe plants that have don’t yield plants with characteristics been improved by modern tools, such as biotechnology. TOOLS OF THE TRADE All plant breeding is genetic modification, but GM is a term that covers more than biotechnology. Plant genes can be altered by: SIMPLE SELECTION. Selecting only seeds of plants with desired traits for replanting, like keeping the seeds from a prize-winning pumpkin. CROSS-POLLINATION. Brushing flower pollen from one variety onto a different variety of a plant—say, Granny Smith apples to Red Delicious apples—to create a combination of genes from both plants (sometimes called a hybrid). GRAFTING. Slicing a bud from one variety to splice into the lower woody stem and roots (rootstock) of another. TISSUE CULTURE. Cutting tissue from growth tips (often free of disease) to dissect and grow into many plants. EMBRYO RESCUE. Culturing the seed embryo from a plant that has naturally cross-pollinated so it will grow in a laboratory for further study or propagation. DNA SEQUENCING. Decoding the sequence of a plant’s genes to unveil those that trigger or suppress flowering, height, taste, or other characteristics. MARKER-ASSISTED SELECTION. Reading DNA to iden- tify the exact genes—usually two or three—responsible for a specific trait so they can be precisely transplanted into another variety of the same type of plant. TRANSGENIC. Inserting a gene from any species into genes of the same or a different species. 4 Your World Did You Know … Moving Along We have improved corn for hundreds of years. or the first generation of biotech crops, scientists concentrated on developing biotech crops that could F better resist disease, pests, and weed-killing herbicides. These traits helped farmers by increasing their yield or lowering their farming costs. For example, by reducing the number of times farmers have to drive over their field with their equipment, biotech crops lower the cost of fuel and machinery, as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists initially worked with corn, cotton, canola and soybeans, and then moved on to squash, sugar beets, Teosinte Primative Corn Modern Corn papaya, sweet peppers, and tomatoes. Under Cultivation In some crops, scientists have been able to “stack” traits. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization has an interactive That is, they have combined multiple desired traits into a map that lets you compare how much land has been under single plant—such as putting herbicide tolerance and insect cultivation over the years, as far back as 1984 in some cases. resistance into a single seed. Many of these crops have been Check out the difference between maize production in South planted in fields all over the world. America, for example: Researchers are now working on second-generation www.fao.org/landandwater/agll/agromaps/interactive/page.jspx. biotech crops. They are working to produce, among other things: Researchers have created Golden Rice—biotech-derived ● Plants that produce even larger harvests. rice with greater levels of vitamins A and E, iron, zinc, and ● Crops that survive in various poor growing conditions protein. Their goal is a more nutritional rice crop that is adapted such as drought, extreme heat or other climate and to areas tilled by low-income farmers in developing countries. environmental stresses. Other scientists are working to increase vitamin A and E ● Crops that are better at using nitrogen from the soil so in cassava and bananas—staple foods in sub-Saharan Africa— they require less fertilizer.
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