General Discussion

RiverLover

(7,830 posts) Sun Aug 16, 2015, 05:41 PM Aug 2015

Be careful what you wish for - Monsanto’s coming up with an alternative to GMOs

Monsanto’s coming up with an alternative to GMOs
Grist
8/13/15

Sharpen your talons, Monsanto haters. Everyone’s favorite biotech company is cooking up a new GMO alternative, and it’s just begging to be crucified.

The new technology, called BioDirect, is a kind of temporary, spray-on defense mechanism for plants. It relies on a natural phenomenon called RNA interference that scientists can use to block crucial genes in, say, Roundup-resistant weeds or killer pests. MIT Technology Review’s Antonio Regalado took a deep dive into the new technology, and it sounds a bit like an Arnold Schwarzenegger character. No one has ever tried spraying RNA on thousands of acres of crops before, so it does raise some legitimate concerns.

Here’s how it works: All living things contain DNA, and that DNA carries the genetic information that cells need to make proteins. But it’s actually RNA, DNA’s less famous workhorse of a partner, that takes that genetic information out into the cell to get shit done. Viruses also use RNA, however, so cells have a kind of defense mechanism to detect viral RNA, memorize its contents, destroy it, and then hunts down its progeny to destroy them too.

Told you it was kind of badass.

With a little tweak, however, this defense mechanism can be turned against itself, so that a cell starts attacking its own genetic code. That’s where BioDirect comes in. Using spray-on RNA that looks like viral RNA but is actually genetic information from weeds or pests or whatever it is Monsanto wants to target, the company can effectively turn the enemy against itself. It could even use BioDirect to target certain genes in crops themselves in order to make those crops, for example, drought resistant....

Read the rest here~
http://grist.org/news/monsantos-coming-up-with-an-alternative-to-gmos/

As a person concerned about honey bees, and all pollinators, I was wondering if this would be better, same, or worse for their survival.

Looks like no one knows just yet, acc to the MIT "deep dive" referenced above~

Last year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency asked a panel of experts to help it decide how to regulate RNA insecticides, including sprays as well as those incorporated into a plant’s genes. In an 81-page letter to the agency, Monsanto lobbied against any special rules. It said RNA products should actually be spared safety tests it called irrelevant, including those designed to assess whether they were toxic to rodents and whether they could cause allergies, as well as in-depth studies of what happens to the molecules in the environment. Only proteins cause allergies, Monsanto said. And when the company doused dirt with RNA, it degraded and was undetectable after 48 hours.

Company research probably won’t ever satisfy critics. The National Honey Bee Advisory Board told the EPA that using RNA interference at this point would put natural systems at “the epitome of risk” and could be as regrettable as our earlier embrace of DDT. “We are decades away from enough scientific understanding to allow sustainable and predictable use of this technology under field conditions,” they said. The beekeepers worry that pollinators could be hurt by unintended effects. They made the point that the genomes of many insects aren’t yet known, so scientists can’t predict whether their genes will match an RNA target.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/540136/the-next-great-gmo-debate/

I'm of the mind that You Don't Mess With Mother Nature. We're messing too much....