Rutgers Scientists Propose Biotech Crop Containment Strategy

June 06, 2007

EDITOR’S NOTE: Professor Maliga may be contacted at 732-445-5329 or e-mail maliga--AT--waksman.rutgers.edu.

New Brunswick, N.J. – Plant geneticists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, may have solved one of the fundamental problems in genetically engineered or modified (also known as GM or GMO or Biotech) crop agriculture: genes leaking into the environment.

In a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Rutgers Professor Pal Maliga and research associate Zora Svab advocate an alternative and more secure means of introducing genetic material into a plant. In GM crops today, novel genes are inserted into a cell nucleus but can eventually wind up in pollen grains or seeds that make their way out into the environment.

The two researchers at Rutgers’ Waksman Institute of Microbiology argue for implanting the genes into another component of the cell – the plastid – where the risk of escape is minimized. Plastids, rarely found in pollen, are small bodies inside the cell that facilitate photosynthesis, the basic life process in plants.

“Our work with a tobacco plant model is breathing new life into an approach that had been dismissed out-of-hand for all the wrong reasons,” said Maliga. “Introducing new agriculturally useful genes through the plastid may prove the most effective means for engineering the next generation of GM crops.”


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