GMOs Archive
NEW AND IMPROVED ANIMALS For thousands of years people have improved crop plants and domestic animals by selective breeding, mostly at a trial-and-error level. Woollier sheep and smarter sheep dogs have both been improved through many generations of selective breeding. …
Although the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996 created a major furor in the media, from a scientific viewpoint it was a relatively small step in a developing technology. Cloning animals relies on the technique of nuclear transplantation . …
Several insects can now be genetically modified. The fruit fly Drosophila has been investigated at the molecular level for a long time and, not surprisingly, methods exist for introducing novel genetic material into these flies. P elements are transposons …
The three diseases that kill most people are acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), tuberculosis, and malaria. Each year, malaria infects some 300 to 500 million people and kills around 2 million, mostly African children. The Plasmodium parasite is transmitted by mosquitoes—as …
The somatotropin gene from cows has been cloned and expressed in bacteria thus allowing the production of large amounts of the hormone, which is known as rBST (recombinant bovine somatotropin) . The rBST is used in the dairy industry to …
Transgenic animals, mostly mice, are of great value in the genetic analysis of inherited diseases and cancer. Here we are interested not so much in adding a cloned transgene as in discovering the function of genes already present. The general …
NEW AND IMPROVED ANIMALS For thousands of years people have improved crop plants and domestic animals by selective breeding, mostly at a trial-and-error level. Woollier sheep and smarter sheep dogs have both been improved through many generations of selective breeding. …
Another issue with transgenic plants is the effect they may have on nontarget organisms , that is, any plants or animals inadvertently exposed to the transgenic crop or insecticide. An article in the journal Nature suggested that Monarch butterflies were …
Plants are highly adaptable and have many mechanisms to survive environmental stresses. Drought and high salinity of irrigation water are two stresses that pose problems in growing crop plants. In drought-tolerant plants, fungi, and bacteria, the sugar trehalose protects the …
Although weeds are a nuisance, even worse enemies of plants, and correspondingly more expensive to farmers, are: 1 . Insects and roundworms 2 . Fungal diseases (molds, blights, rusts, and rots) 3 . Viral diseases of plants It is possible …