About the ideal potato, the opinion of the scientific community about genetic modification and that the very first product of this technology - insulin - saved lives more than destroyed fascism, in his lecture the flavorist (specialist in the smell of substances, flavorings) Sergey Belkov, head of the department talks about development of food additives by one of the well-known companies - manufacturers of food ingredients.
I remember how in biology classes in high school we went through DNA, the transfer of hereditary information, mutations, selection, and I was amazed at what prospects this knowledge opens up for humanity. Imagine only if absolutely all the processes taking place in our body are encoded in the chain of the DNA molecule, and each of the sections of this chain - genes - can encode a specific protein, which, in turn, performs a particular function, then simply by interfering with this sequence we can change the organisms as we need.
This idea arose, of course, not by accident. In the 1990s, our family, like many at that time, lived on a subsistence economy: we grew potatoes on a small plot. In central Russia, agriculture has always been an unreliable occupation. Our weather is unstable, the soil is not rich, and in the fall we used to dig as much as we dug in the spring. Then I thought: can't we humans really make the perfect potato? Which would give a reliable high yield, regardless of drought or rain. Which the Colorado beetles wouldn't eat. Which would not produce solanine (this poison, although in small quantities, is found in potatoes).
It would take hundreds of years to breed such a variety by selection, but we know so much about DNA - who is stopping us from removing unnecessary genes and adding the necessary ones in order to correct the plant physiology to our requirements?
Later it turned out that, of course, I was not the first to think about this obvious perspective. I was surprised to learn that the first living organism obtained in such an artificial way appeared on the planet at the same time as me. In 1978, in California, by modifying the usual E. coli, they first produced a bacterium capable of producing insulin - a drug that saves countless lives every year. And at the time when I was just thinking about the prospects of endowing potatoes with useful properties, passions about the dangers of new technologies were already flaring up in the world.
These passions have reached our country.
"Integration" of genes
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Probably the most famous and at the same time the most absurd horror story about GMOs is “gene insertion”. There is something in this that resembles mass psychosis. I really do not understand how a person who graduated from high school, who is familiar with human physiology, can seriously think about it, be afraid of it. Every day we eat a huge amount of foreign DNA: tomatoes, potatoes, fish, wheat, yeast, bacteria. Our ancestors did this, our descendants will do this, all living beings on the planet do this. The digestive system takes apart the eaten DNA into separate pieces - nucleotides, from which our body then assembles its own molecule according to the existing template.
Can foreign DNA "integrate" into our own and force our cell to perform functions unusual for it? In some cases it can. Among many unicellular organisms, horizontal gene transfer is an ordinary and natural process that has not stopped since the first living cells appeared. Viruses can generally intercept the control of the biochemical processes of the infected cell.
Does this example have any relation to the danger of a genetically modified organism for humans or nature? No more than the danger of any other organism
Yes, viruses are able to insert their genes into the DNA of another organism. More precisely, only some viruses are in the DNA of some organisms. If all viruses had this ability and we could not resist it, then we would not even appear. Evolution has created its own defense mechanisms to prevent viruses from entering our cells, as well as destroying already infected cells.
Probably, everyone had the flu, but everyone reading this article now came out victorious in the fight against the disease - we were able to overcome the attempt of foreign genes to seize control over our cells
It is the ability of viruses to "embed" themselves into someone else's DNA, by the way, that is actively used today in genetic modification. We have not yet learned how to "insert" the desired gene directly and use workarounds. It's never about changing the whole organism: scientists are working on individual cells. A new organism, then grown from this cell, can no longer transfer the "built-in" gene to any other cell, just as the usual potatoes and corn cannot integrate their genes into foreign cells.
After all, even we humans are also the result of viral gene modification. About 8% of our DNA has a completely viral origin: we inherited these genes from viruses that once infected the germ cells of our distant ancestors. They are no longer able to behave as separate viruses, but some of them still work inside us. In particular, syncytin, encoded by the genome of one of these viruses (which entered our DNA more than 40 million years ago), plays an important role in the functioning of the placenta in humans, controlling cell fusion during the formation of the outer layer of the placenta, preventing the mother from rejecting the fetus and protecting him from infections. To paraphrase a well-known saying, we can say that to some extent a person “descended” from viruses.
We are frightened by the alienness of genes, their unnaturalness, incompatibility. Shows collages of half-fruits, half-scorpions. They tell horror stories about shark liver genes. But that's not how it works!
There are no genes for the liver or any other organ - every cell in the body carries a complete set of genetic information
There are no scorpion genes or tomato genes. There are no human genes. There are genes that encode information about the structure of a particular protein. There is a gene that carries information necessary for the synthesis of insulin or for the construction of the olfactory receptor. This is a universal natural mechanism that underlies the life of all living things on the planet. In general, the set of our genes is barely distinguishable from the genome of chimpanzees and overlaps with the genomes of fish or reptiles to a large extent. At the same time, there are no two genetically identical people (except for identical twins).
We do not yet have the ability to synthesize genes from "scratch" and therefore we take ready-made constructions from nature, forcing them to work where we need them. It is simpler, it is more reliable at the current level of development of science, and there is nothing terrible or reprehensible in this. If we take a gene from carrots that is responsible for the production of beta-carotene, and insert it into the DNA of rice, then rice will not be able to grow roots in any way, it will only begin to produce the substance we need. Even if we wanted to insert a gene from a scorpion into the DNA of a banana, the banana would not be able to crawl away or sting.