DragonI

While they might look unusual, these watermelons were not genetically modified. They were simply grown in a box.

Can Genetic Engineering Save the Florida Orange?

news.nationalgeographic.com

Genetically modified oranges resist a disease that's destroying Florida's groves. But will Americans drink the juice?

Citrus greening, the plague that could wipe out Florida's $9 billion orange industry, begins with the touch of a jumpy brown bug on a sun-kissed leaf.

From there, the bacterial disease incubates in the tree's roots, then moves back up the trunk in full force, causing nutrient flows to seize up. Leaves turn yellow, and the oranges, deprived of sugars from the leaves, remain green, sour, and hard. Many fall before harvest, brown necrotic flesh ringing failed stems.

For the past decade, Florida's oranges have been literally starving.

Since it first appeared in 2005, citrus greening, also known by its Chinese name, huanglongbing, has swept across Florida's groves like a flood. With no hills to block it, the Asian citrus psyllid—the invasive aphid relative that carries the disease—has infected nearly every orchard in the state.

By one estimate, 80 percent of Florida's citrus trees are infected and declining.

The disease has spread beyond Florida to nearly every orange-growing region in the United States. Despite many generations of breeding by humanity, no citrus plant resists greening; it afflicts lemons, grapefruits, and other citrus species as well. Once a tree is infected, it will die. (See "Can Parasitic Wasps Help Save America's Citrus?")

Yet in a few select Floridian orchards, there are now trees that, thanks to innovative technology, can fight the greening tide. These trees have the potential to keep Florida orange juice on your breakfast table—provided you are willing to drink the juice of oranges that have been genetically modified to contain genes from spinach. (Read "The Next Green Revolution" in National Geographic magazine.)

Monsanto Owns Us: The Monopoly of Seeds and Intellectual Property Rights

darkecologies.com

For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they’ve come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation’s two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.

- from CorpWatch by Peter Whoriskey (Washington Post) – US: Monsanto’s dominance draws antitrust inquiry

...

One could say that the story of such companies as Monsanto is at bottom the story of neoliberalism with a vengeance. At the center of this particular story is the notion of intellectual property rights: “Control over seed is the first link in the food chain because seed is the source of life. When a corporation controls seed, it controls life, especially the life of farmers (see: Seeds of Suicide by Dr. Vandana Shiva).”Monsanto has most of the patents on seeds in the world today. As Shiva states it for India: “Monsanto has become the “Life Lord” of our planet, collecting rents for life’s renewal from farmers, the original breeders.” On another sad note in In India, more than 250,000 farmers have committed suicide after Monsanto’s Bt cotton seeds did not perform as promised.  Farmers, left in desperate poverty, are opting to free their families of debt by drinking Monsanto pesticide, thereby ending their lives. Many farmers in other countries are also stripped of their livelihood as a result of false promises, seed patenting and meticulous legal action on the part of Monsanto and other big-ag interests. In many parts of Africa, farmers and their communities are left to choose between starving or eating GMOs. – See more at: http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/p/press-release.html#sthash.zTpdkW7B.dpuf

Research at Nanjing University has found that strands of RNA from vegetables make it into our bloodstream after we eat them, and can regulate the expression of our genes once they're inside us.

MicroRNAs, or miRNAs, are little strands of RNA that selectively bind to matching sequences of messenger RNA, resulting in repression of those genes. Their role has only been understood in the last decade or so, but miRNAs are currently believed to take part in a vast number of processes in both plants and animals.

Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues found plant miRNA sequences in the tissue of animals that ate those plants. One of them, called MIR168a, is produced by rice and abundantly found in the blood of the Chinese humans studied. In experiments, MIR168a showed the ability to affect gene expression in mouse, inhibiting the liver's ability to filter out LDL, the lipoprotein with the street name of "bad cholesterol."

This finding reveals an entirely new mechanism of physiological interaction, which could have significant medical applications as a therapeutic vector as well as explaining processes that are poorly understood (Zhang's example is Chinese herbal medicine). MicroRNA is also used in the genetic engineering of crops, as a method of RNA interference.