Designer Seeds - A New Breed of Seeds

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Summary

Introduction

A New Breed of Seeds

Limits of Traditional Breeding

Taming the Crown Gall

The Quest for Desirable Genes

A. tumefaciens Meets Bt genes

Genetic Stumbling Block

Viral Resistance

Herbicide Resistance

Meeting Challenges Posed by Bioengineered Plants

New Possibilities on the Horizon

Credits

A New Breed of Seeds

A farmer handles seeds of cotton while contemplating the freshly tilled fields that are ready to receive them. Although the seeds look just like the ones he planted last year, they are far from ordinary. These seeds will yield nearly 10 percent more cotton and will need less than half as much insecticide as last year's standard seeds. This improvement stems from an additional gene

that scientists have inserted in the seeds' genetic material, or genome. The gene, which originated in bacteria

and is not found naturally in plants, encodes a toxic protein that kills two of the prime predators of cotton plants--bollworms and budworms. These caterpillars destroy millions of dollars worth of cotton each year, and are the main reason why more than half the insecticide used worldwide is sprayed on cotton plants.

Although the farmer might view the bioengineered seeds in his hands as merely the outcome of recent progress in plant-breeding efforts by the company that produced them, they are actually the result of more than 50 years of research by many scientists. Incrementally, these scientists paved the way for isolating the genes that protect a particular organism from pests and for transferring these genes into a wide variety of plants. They could not have known that the answers to their fundamental questions about living organisms would lead to practical results, such as these bioengineered crop seeds.

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BT Toxin Resources - Information and links about BT from the USDA.
Plant Transformation - Photographic overview of the methods used to transfer genes into the chromosomes of plants.
The Plant Pathology Internet Guide Book - A very complete list of agricultural science sites.
Transgenic Crops - Information on all aspects of transgenic crops, including crop management and legal and regulatory issues.