GMO's - good or bad?

[Polycrates]

I'm going to ignore this part where you, again, copy-pasted information from somewhere to make yourself look less ignorant.

Soooo I take it you're not going to engage with the example you asked for? But you're accusing me of lying about my profession instead? I have to say, I think that's pretty poor form. I'm trying to stay civil here, but you're making it awfully hard. It's a shame too, because I thought it was quite a nice example. Still, I'm a nice guy so I'll let you know how the transduction goes - I start the drug treatment on tuesday.

We probably wouldn't have to, because their genetic properties would be, like almonds disadvantageous to them in competing in their environment. But sure, go ahead and stick with the wild rabbit model.

The "probably" there, and in every other aspect of the GMO debate, is my key sticking point. "Probably" just isn't good enough for this sort of thing, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not much of a gambler, though.

That's nice, but unless you are hiding a magical solution to political problems causing food supply problems, this can be one solution.

I don't buy it, for reasons already set out. In many ways, I suspect it can only make a lot of problems worse in the current political environment, though I'm not going to get into that.

Here's another instance in which you condemn your ignorance. You don't understand that p53 is just a signal protein, and without things like receptors to regulate those signals, it's just a big molecular blob floating around doing nothing. So that's why when you, once again, mass quote-mined something to make yourself sound less ignorant, you fell flat on your face again. This is why I can't take the claims of the anti-GMO crowd seriously. Like creationists, they appeal to people's ignorance.

Here's the thing: no protein in a cell is just a big molecular blob floating around doing nothing. No protein is so perfectly specific in its functions that it has its "canonical" effects and no others.
Here's a fun test to do - transduce in your transgene of choice, alongside your vector-only control, give them a few days to express and then run them on a microarray. You're going to get all sorts of weird and wonderful transcriptional changes coming up in pathways you'd never dream were affected. Now microarrays are a bit rubbish, so some of those may be noise (and you can bet that there are plenty more real interactions that you're missing), but some of it is going to be real if you go to the trouble of validating it. Trying to figure out the full extent of what's going on is a mug's game, and just flat-out not possible with current tech. You've ignored my GFP example, but if you went to a publisher with data on the effects of a transgene co-expressing GFP and didn't have a GFP-only control, I promise you that you wouldn't get very far.
A protein that's farting around in the nucleus or the cytoplasm is going to interact with something, even if only very weakly, and that interaction is going to be greater and more non-specific the more of that protein there is. When we insert transgenes, they're generally attached to pretty much an "always-on" promoter - in mammalian cells it's things like the cytomegalovirus promoter. So the cell is gonna be constantly churning out mRNA and protein at a rate of knots, roughly proportional to the copy number of the insert. And the thing is that inserting an entirely foreign transgene also means that its levels can't be properly kept in check by the endogenous regulatory mechanisms - whether they be transcriptional downregulation or proteasomal degradation or whathaveyou (although the promoter can be methylated into ineffectiveness, but that's a different kettle of fish altogether). So you're never going to have well-regulated levels of ectopic protein in your given cell - and quantitative differences can have very very qualitative consequences. With your medical background, you'll be aware that even very precisely designed pharmaceuticals are going to have off-target effects at higher concentrations. Hell, you'll struggle to find any that don't have off-target effects (not just side-effects) at their effective "tolerated" dose. I don't know if you medicos get the same sort of info from the drug companies that we get, but we get a nice little investigator booklet thing that has IC50s for inhibition of all sorts of other things, and that's only the obvious ones they've actually checked. Same thing with proteins - protein-protein interactions are just not that perfectly precise. Those neat pathway diagrams in your undergrad textbooks - with a place for everything and everything in its place - don't tell even close to the whole story, even when they're not just flat-out wrong, which is more often than you'd think.

Again, speak for yourself. I actually have an extensive education in biochemistry and molecular biology, which I was required to have in my medical education. That's why it's so easy for me to catch you playing scientist and laugh at you.

Oh man

 

[El_Machinae]

Nano, I don't know why you're having such trouble in this discussion. Polycrates is clearly discussing the issue, but using layman (popularised) scientific phrasings in order to expand the audience. How can a conversation move forward if you just rudely ignore the gist of each comment? You're touting your scientific credentials, but your commentary increasingly makes it seem like you don't really understand ecology (or even, really, trangenics, which I find really hard to believe). Since I cannot really imagine you don't understand transgenics that well, there might actually be a problem with how you're communicating. Maybe being increasingly rude, dismissive, and ignoring gist (which I cannot understand the motivation for ...) is making you look more ignorant?

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Oh man

Polycrates is clearly discussing the issue, but using layman (popularised) scientific phrasings in order to expand the audience.

By name-dropping words like "epigenetic"? Right. I have a more plausible conclusion. Trolling.

 

[El_Machinae]

Seriously, it's like you're reading a totally different discussion ...

 

[Polycrates]

By name-dropping words like "epigenetic"? Right. I have a more plausible conclusion. Trolling.

I don't enjoy being called a liar, so obviously we're done here.

But I suspected you might respond with something like that, and I was at work late, so I made you a quick present. I hope we can still be bros! It's an artwork I entitle "The Problem Of Hubris Combined With Limited Knowledge (A GM Crop Allegory)"

 

[Tani Coyote]

Theoretically, some disruption of ecosystems is just the logical extension of natural selection.

I see no reason not to improve crops myself. Rice that's high in protein? Millions find their diets suddenly improved!

So long as we aren't destroying huge amounts of animal species as an extension of GM crops... I don't see a problem.

Of course, given the USA's lax on regulation, letting companies run loose probably could have all sorts of negative effects. There should be strong rules on the use of GM crops, accordingly.

 

[innonimatu]

I don't enjoy being a liar, so obviously we're done here.

But I suspected you might respond with something like that, and I was at work late, so I made you a quick present. I hope we can still be bros! It's an artwork I entitle "The Problem Of Hubris Combined With Limited Knowledge (A GM Crop Allegory)"

And that is an epic post!

 

[G-Max]

DNA that is perfectly natural and healthy in one environment can do radically different things when placed in a very different environment. Shoving a jellyfish gene into a plant is not only laughably crude, but expecting it to behave in the exact same way as in a jellyfish and only in that way seems to me like ridiculous optimism.

Uh, wrong. That gene does the exact same thing in plants that it does in jellyfish: namely, it makes things glow in the dark. Taking the glow-in-the-dark DNA from a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish and putting it in a tobacco plant creates glow-in-the-dark tobacco, not the Mean Green Mother From Outer Space.

Pictured: the result of Hollywood fantasy, not genetic engineering.

 

[Polycrates]

Uh, wrong. That gene does the exact same thing in plants that it does in jellyfish: namely, it makes things glow in the dark. Taking the glow-in-the-dark DNA from a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish and putting it in a tobacco plant creates glow-in-the-dark tobacco, not the Mean Green Mother From Outer Space.

I'm sorry man, I'm getting a little tired of this thread and all its unnecessary hostility - and this has already been sort of covered so I'm just gonna cut and paste what I wrote before.

Turns out, proteins don't have a set function and do nothing else - they can have all sorts of incidental interactions. Take jellyfish GFP, for instance. It's pretty much the most-used transgene, both because it's useful and because it doesn't seem to cause much in the way of health issues. It's from a jellyfish, so maybe it ought to be doing nothing, right? But if you transduce it into a cell, it does have an effect beyond making that cell glow nice and pretty green. Increase of cell death, reduction in cell cycle entry, minor morphological changes, etc. Is that because of the protein itself interacting with some other signalling pathway, the presence of transgenic retroviral DNA stuffing up the normal action of the cell's genome, or just because the cytomegalovirus promoter is just pumping out such ridiculous quantities of mRNA/protein that it has an impact on the cellular environment? I don't know, all I know is that it has a minor effect - the sort of thing that has chronic rather than acute consequences, the kind of thing that is hard to see.

Here's the thing: no protein in a cell is just a big molecular blob floating around doing nothing. No protein is so perfectly specific in its functions that it has its "canonical" effects and no others....<snip>
A protein that's farting around in the nucleus or the cytoplasm is going to interact with something, even if only very weakly, and that interaction is going to be greater and more non-specific the more of that protein there is. When we insert transgenes, they're generally attached to pretty much an "always-on" promoter - in mammalian cells it's things like the cytomegalovirus promoter. So the cell is gonna be constantly churning out mRNA and protein at a rate of knots, roughly proportional to the copy number of the insert. And the thing is that inserting an entirely foreign transgene also means that its levels can't be properly kept in check by the endogenous regulatory mechanisms - whether they be transcriptional downregulation or proteasomal degradation or whathaveyou (although the promoter can be methylated into ineffectiveness, but that's a different kettle of fish altogether). So you're never going to have well-regulated levels of ectopic protein in your given cell - and quantitative differences can have very very qualitative consequences. <snip> protein-protein interactions are just not that perfectly precise. Those neat pathway diagrams in your undergrad textbooks - with a place for everything and everything in its place - don't tell even close to the whole story, even when they're not just flat-out wrong, which is more often than you'd think.

 

[innonimatu]

Uh, wrong. That gene does the exact same thing in plants that it does in jellyfish: namely, it makes things glow in the dark. Taking the glow-in-the-dark DNA from a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish and putting it in a tobacco plant creates glow-in-the-dark tobacco, not the Mean Green Mother From Outer Space.

Pictured: the result of Hollywood fantasy, not genetic engineering.

You know, my background is in chemistry, never had anything to do with genetics research, so I've been quiet on the thread lately. But I would like to say that with chemistry since it became a "modern science" we had some three centuries of theories providing simple and logic explanations to phenomena, only to be discard, sometimes in part, sometimes entirely and spectacularly, by new discoveries. "Simple" and settled stuff usually turns out to be far more complex than people imagined. Even now, I wouldn't dare say that the current interpretations of quantum theory, are the final word for chemistry/physics.

So, it is a lot of hubris to assume that genetics, and the extremely complex biochemical mechanisms within cells, is something already settled, much less something simple and predictable!

 

[Verbose]

Yes, quite.

I also keep wondering what will happen when it all also runs into possibly unanticipated effects of nano-technology?

I feel pretty sure "life will find a way" as always, but what way?

 

[classical_hero]

Uh, wrong. That gene does the exact same thing in plants that it does in jellyfish: namely, it makes things glow in the dark. Taking the glow-in-the-dark DNA from a glow-in-the-dark jellyfish and putting it in a tobacco plant creates glow-in-the-dark tobacco, not the Mean Green Mother From Outer Space.

Pictured: the result of Hollywood fantasy, not genetic engineering.

I love the hyperbole you are having over his words. The thing is that with all the changed we are making to the plants, we should be testing to make sure they are not going to be dangerous. Some of the concerns raised b some people that are against GMOs right now, is that we simply don't have enough data to know if they are safe or not. We need to settle that before we can release them in the open.

 

[innonimatu]

Speaking of unexpected findings, was this really unexpected? And what does it means regarding the alleged safety of genetically modified foodstuffs?

Our previous studies have demonstrated that stable microRNAs (miRNAs) in mammalian serum and plasma are actively secreted from tissues and cells and can serve as a novel class of biomarkers for diseases, and act as signaling molecules in intercellular communication. Here, we report the surprising finding that exogenous plant miRNAs are present in the sera and tissues of various animals and that these exogenous plant miRNAs are primarily acquired orally, through food intake.

edit: actually, and on second thought, I'm almost sure that this was mentioned already, sorry. But I guess I may as well leave it posted.

 

[GoodGame]

Speaking of unexpected findings, was this really unexpected? And what does it means regarding the alleged safety of genetically modified foodstuffs?



edit: actually, and on second thought, I'm almost sure that this was mentioned already, sorry. But I guess I may as well leave it posted.

It possibly is surprising. I'm not surprised to find that within "the tree of life" that there are some genes common to all eukaryotes (including plantae and animalia). It's a very interesting addition to human knowledge of cellular mechanisms, and especially about interspecies intercellular communication.

The article you cited isn't frivolous research at all though. microRNA are a regulatory mechanism in cells that are semi-marvelous. They were accidentally discovered in plant research (late 1980s) that genetically transformed plants somehow failed to be expressed the genes; they weren't really understood until this past decade, and research into them as sort of exploded post 2006. It turns out that eukaryotes have a mechanism from blocking some viral integration of RNA (a kin to what the genetic engineering was doing). The mechanism involves microRNA. It's actually very complicated in pathways, so I won't try to explain it. Part of their mechanism is to affect the transcript of a host's genome though.

It's difficult to say how effective a cross-species communication by microRNA is though (this article suggests that it is possible in vivo, but I'd have to read it thoroughly and question how broadly they proved their conclusion). It's also really difficult to say if this would have a profound impact on food science research, much less USDA approval of genetic engineering of food crops. It's possible this is discovering that water is wet, on a very detailed scale.

If this does have a profound impact of agriculture regulation, then I'd take a hard look at your corn, cotton, and soybean stocks (soybeans especially, as most of the crop is GMO currently). This one article doesn't convince me of anything, and unless the USDA makes a ruling based on such research, I wouldn't be more than interested/curious at this point.

sidenote: microRNA are also interesting as potential markers for disease states to aid diagnostic screening. Research and commercialization attempts exist to do so.

 

[Narz]

Bad poll is bad.

Agreed.

They should be studied more.

I'm a big fan of the precautionary principle but unfortunately my home country believes in profit before prudence.

 

[Arwon]

I don't think it makes much sense at all to talk about GMO in the singular.