Scientists Just Found a Way to Make GMOs Much Safer

Biotech researchers think they’ve found a way to keep modified genes from escaping into other organisms.

Warning signs on the door to a Monsanto lab for GMO corn.Renee C. Byer/ZUMA


It’s the worst nightmare of activists opposed to genetically modified crops: An errant GMO seed blows out of a wheat or corn field and breeds with a species in the wild or on a neighboring farm. The modified gene proliferates and spreads through the population, and pretty soon the line between engineered crops and their “natural” counterparts begins to disappear, with unpredictable consequences for ecosystems.

This happened in 2010 in North Dakota, when scientists discovered that genes from genetically engineered canola—grown commercially for its oil across the state—were appearing in nearly every sample of canola taken in the wild. In that case, the “escape” of GMO canola turned out to be no big deal.

But it raised eyebrows with plant scientists about how quickly modified genes can spread. Some warned that plants engineered to be especially hardy—for example, the drought- and heat-tolerant plants that agribusiness giants like Monsanto are pushing as a remedy to climate change—could drive out native breeds, taking with them a precious store of genetic diversity.

“This will be a barrier unlike any that has existed in the kingdoms of life.”

Since the late 1970s, when genetically engineered crops began to arrive on US farms, federal and state agencies have applied a smattering of rules and regulations to prevent this from happening. But on Wednesday, a pair of new studies published in Nature offered, for the first time, a protection that comes straight from an organism’s DNA.

After several years of painstaking research, bioengineers at Yale and Harvard have developed a method to ensure organisms with engineered DNA could survive only in designated environments, and not in the wild. Their research was on the bacteria E. coli, but the scientists said the same basic steps could be applied to genetically modified crops, as well as to bacteria used to process dairy products, probiotics for health applications, and even the microorganisms sometimes used to clean up oil spills.

“Endowing safeguards now is important to allow the field [of biotechnology] to go forward,” said geneticist Farren Isaacs, a co-author of the Yale study.

To understand how the proposed solution works, let’s back up to a few basics of genetics. Everything about an organism—its color, how it reproduces or digests food, basically any trait you can think of—is encoded in its DNA, a long sequence of base molecules represented by the letters A, T, C, and G. Stretches of this code are called genes; the entire thing is a genome.

The bases make up a blueprint that tells a cell how to arrange amino acids taken from the environment into functional proteins that are the building blocks of life. Every three bases along the chain code for a specific amino acid, of which there are 20. One of the coolest things about biology is that those same 20 amino acids, dictated by the same code, are used by every living thing from bacteria to apple trees to humans.

What Isaacs and his colleagues managed to do was to re-code an E. coli genome so that it could make use of a special 21st amino acid that was synthetically produced in a lab. Then they went a step further, by planting the code for that acid inside genes that are essential to the bacteria’s basic life functions. When the bacteria is moved to a Petri dish without the synthetic amino acid, it dies. The method could give biotech researchers an unprecedented level of control over their genetic modifications.

“We do consider this a new class of organism,” said George Church, a Harvard geneticist who co-authored one of the papers. “This will be a barrier unlike any that has existed in the kingdoms of life.”

The implication is that when an organism’s genes are modified for a specific function—to increase corn yield, for example—those same genes could also be outfitted with this custom re-coding to make them dependent a steady supply of a synthetic amino acid that can’t be procured in the wild. In the case of crops, that could be supplied through custom fertilizer—a concept that is similar to how existing GMO crops are engineered to work in tandem with certain herbicides. If one of these seeds found its way into the wild, it wouldn’t survive without the synthetic amino acid. Of course, that could open up an entirely new avenue for Monsanto and its peers to monopolize the equipment farmers need to eke out a competitive edge.

Crops with this built-in protection are still years away, Isaacs said: Plant genomes are larger and more complex than E. coli, and it takes longer to grow lab samples of plants than of bacteria. And each new gene to be modified means more time and money.

But this kind of protection is increasingly important in the context of global warming. While GMO crops could be an important tool for some farmers to cope with increased drought or other climate change impacts, they pose a definite threat to genetic diversity. And the need to protect genetic diversity has never been greater, according to a separate study this week from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

As changing climate conditions shift—and in many cases shrink—where crops are able to grow, 16 to 22 percent of wild relatives of crops will go extinct by 2050, the FAO study found. When those varieties disappear, they take with them a treasure trove of genetic adaptations that could be cross-bred with commercial varieties to help plants survive climate change. That study recommends expanding seed banks and traditional breeding programs to preserve diversity. Christopher Emsden, an FAO spokesperson, said genetically modified crops don’t need to be a part of that equation, adding that the debate over GMOs is a “hot potato” he didn’t want to comment on.

“The main thing to note here is that this hundred-page report makes not a single mention of GMOs,” Emsden wrote in an email.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate