Genetically modified crops pass benefits to weeds

http://www.nature.com/news/genetically-modified-crops-pass-benefits-to-weeds-1.13517

by feelthepain • 13 years ago

53 45 13 years ago

This seems peculiar. I can't understand why, if this relatively straightforward modification in the production of EPSP conferred such a major advantage to the organism, that it didn't develop as a result of natural selection.

There has to be a downside that this study didn't pick up. Perhaps the change makes the plant more attractive to pests?

tomp• 13 years ago

A simple reason could be that the gene just never happened to appear in the DNA; natural selection cannot "develop" new genes, in can only "select" which of the existing (combination of) genes are better.

guard-of-terra2• 13 years ago

There are several ways how a part of genome can suddently be duplicated with all its genes. That's how every species have different number of chromosomes.

I might guess that competitive advantage only apply where weeds are bad: in fields. Before fields there were no advantage to this.

sampo9• 13 years ago

In this case the gene in question is the EPSP synthase, and it occurs in plants also naturally. The GMO plants just have more of it.

Duplicating a gene should be well within the capability of normal evolutionary processes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSP_synthase

D9u• 13 years ago

Sort of like antibiotics resulting in more resistant bacteria...

novalis• 13 years ago

In a way I find it rather unfortunate that gmo's lack of self termination is being given a beneficial spin of sorts, maybe because we are now balls out with this "hey, it's a conjoin real world test either you like it or not" approach from PR. Reading through it actually sobers up the title effect.

simonh• 13 years ago

The authors of the study assume that the changes they found in their modified crop are beneficial, but that's purely an assumption on their part. On the face of it higher rates of photosynthesis, more shoots, etc sound great but in practice there could be all kinds of selective pressures on wild crops that would make these adaptations undesirable.

In poor soil, adverse weather, etc these adaptations might make the plant burn itself out too quickly like a sprinter in a marathon race. The emphasis on growth might weaken it's immune system, or make it more susceptible to disease in other ways.

I'm always interested in these studies on how engineered changes interact with the wider ecosystem and make their way into other organisms. I'm not dissing the research, it sounds like a valuable study, but finding potentially advantageous changes in the lab and finding those changes actually confer an advantage in the wild are two wholly different things.

sampo9• 13 years ago

"On the face of it higher rates of photosynthesis, more shoots, etc sound great but in practice there could be all kinds of selective pressures on wild crops that would make these adaptations undesirable."

Thank you for a very valuable comment. It's nice to see understanding of plant ecophysiology in Hacker News.

So, I went to the original article [1] and this is about how they measure fitness:

"Measurement of photosynthetic rates [...] We used glasshouse-grown GE and non-GE F3 plants"

"Seed germination experiment [...] Seeds were germinated on wet filter paper in Petri dishes."

"Field experiments [...] Common garden experiments were conducted [...] 36 plants were planted in a 6x6 grid with 20 cm between plants [...] weeds were removed by hand-weeding [...] urea (nitrogen) per 100 m2 was applied [...] Insecticides that are commonly used in rice fields were applied"

So, fitness is measured in (i) glasshouse (ii) on wet filter paper in laboratory and (iii) in garden conditions, with fertilizers and insecticides applied.

Now, the original article doesn't claim anything beyond that, and a case can be made that the natural environment of a weed is in in the rice field (with fertilizers and insecticides), but the Nature article says "effects of such modification have the potential to extend beyond farms and into the wild" and like you said, measuring fitness in glasshouse/lab/garden conditions tells pretty much nothing about fitness in the wild beyond farms.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12428/abstrac...

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

The plants aren't being engineered to be released into the wild to grow unsupervised. They will be sold to farmers along with a program that probably includes fertilizer and pesticide, and maybe even an herbicide in the case of Roundup (glyphosphate) resistant varieties. I'm not sure what consideration is given to the fact that these crops will make hybrid crosses with wild crops and propagate some of their traits, which could be a disaster.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

This is not a "benefit". I want roundup to kill crops, as it should.

And I want roundup away from my plants and my environment. Thanks.

I love how PR could twist a bad to make it a good. Hey, we don't have a way to control our GM crops contaminating other crops!! How great is that! By the way,pay me for using my intellectual property that is in your crops even when you don't want it, as it is a benefit for you.

Xylakant• 13 years ago

it's "benefit" as in "benefit for the plant". What's good for the weed is not always good for the farmer though. This is not a PR piece trying to spin a bad thing into a good thing but an article pointing out a real problem with gm crops.

stinos• 13 years ago

"Good" for the weed would be if RoundUp weren't used in the first place. Then there would be no benefit whatsoever.

Mordor• 13 years ago

plot twist: it's Monsanto which is the real weed

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

...and regular corn does too. Is this news?

brudgers2• 13 years ago

"Weed" has no botanical meaning. That's a clue that there's something other than straight up science occurring in the article.

coldtea5• 13 years ago

And water has no chemical meaning. But you see it in chemistry papers all the time...

brudgers2• 13 years ago

That's fucking nonsense.

A botanist can't examine a plant and tell if it is a weed. A chemist can examine a liquid and determine if it is water.

This is because, despite being a common language term, "water" maps to a specific chemical compound.

"Weed" is a common language term that maps to nothing in a scientific context. RoundUp is an herbacide, it only becomes slective, i.e. "a weedkiller" when some plants are genetically modified and this because we define "weeds" as whatever plants Roundup kills.

The set of weeds for a horticulturist is different from the set of weeds for an agronomist and both are different from the set of weeds for an ecologist - and more importantly, the horticulturist's weeds and the ecologist's weeds will tend toward polar opposites.

The same is of course true with the agronomist. Thus a natural food bearing plant is described as a weed in the article.

The premises upon which the article are based are economic not scientific despite the name of the publication.

gamblor956• 13 years ago

Unless the meaning of "water" has changed sometime in the past second, water is the liquid form of the chemical substance dihydogen oxide (i.e., H2O). This is the same meaning its had since the atomic components of water were first determined...

belorn• 13 years ago

The implication of cross-pollination on genetic patents is quite far reaching. Sooner or later, more lawsuits will pop up, and the Supreme Court is going to have to decide again. The narrow scope of Bowman v. Monsanto Co. is unlikely to be enough if farmers use plants of different species.

I wonder slightly at what point an plant still inhabits the "invention". 99% genetic similarity to the patent? 10%? 1%? At what point does it losses the attribute of being the property of Monsanto?

api4• 13 years ago

I've gotten into so many flame wars over GMO by taking a side that is sympathetic to anti-GMO activists.

I have a degree in biology. I'm sympathetic to the activists even though I do not agree scientifically with many of their claims. Thing is that I can see why they are skeptical of GMOs and why they do not trust the companies making them, and I don't think their reaction is especially irrational.

And I've always been skeptical of GMOs for different reasons. I studied evolutionary biology a lot, and the set-up that you get with GMOs always struck me as similar to the set-up you get when you over-use one single antibiotic. At first it works beautifully, but then the bugs adapt. In this case the entire ecosystem adapts.

Transgenes are natural. Horizontal gene transfer happens all the time. This destroys a lot of the BS claims of the activists, but it is also a problem for the supposed benefits of GMO crops... as we see here.

I also think the issue of patents and self-reproducing organisms is a legal hell-hole.

kolinko• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that GMO is not just about replacing pesticides, but also about adding other benefits to plants - like in the case of golden rice, or the weeds that glow in the dark.

coldtea5• 13 years ago

Still, even those are performed by "amateur magicians" that don't know and have no way of knowing the long term effects of such additions to the ecosystem -- they just know that short term, they benefit commerce, ie. more money faster.

Nature, animal and insect life, is far too chaotic a process involving too many interactions, for them to know what long term effects "weeds that glow in the dark" will have (Let's adopt GMOs! It's from the guys that brought us Thalidomide!). So they mostly experiment in real life, with government regulatory bodies that are easily bought or swayed.

(And no, the "overpopulation that needs to be fed" defense that's often used is mostly BS. For one, they could not care less: they patent their work to death and charge a premium for the seeds to poor third world farmers -- as drug companies do with AIDS drugs etc. Second, the main use of those techniques it to make food for the first world, sold to the same people that always had food, have higher profit margins).

As for the reason a lot of people in the tech etc community are pro-GMOs, I think it's two-fold:

For one, they react to some rather poor arguments from the anti-GMO crowd, that, as any large crowd, also contains ignorant people, neo-hippies, etc. So they throw the baby (caution and scepticism) with the bathwater (ignorant claims).

Second, they confuse engineering (including GMO engineering) with science, and think that by defending any random money-grabbing work of engineering they are defending "science" against the ignorant masses. They make an ego conpensating psychological mechanism out of science, like religious people do with religion.

sampo9• 13 years ago

"And I've always been skeptical of GMOs for different reasons."

In a way, this is nothing new. When Norman Borlaug was working to save the couple of billion lives with his green revolution, also his plant breeding methods (which we now see as traditional, totally natural and acceptable) were often seen a unnatural and potentially dangerous:

"Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by people who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Criticisms_and_h...

"I also think the issue of patents and self-reproducing organisms is a legal hell-hole."

There actually exists plant breeder's rights for traditional (non-GMO) varieties, so the situation with patents may not be so much different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights

api4• 13 years ago

Borlaug's rebuttal definitely applies to some anti-GMO activists, who can easily be described as privileged Western elites engaging in fashionable protest.

At the same time, there are some long-term criticisms that are not mentioned here. Borlaug's methods are almost entirely reliant on fossil fuels for example, so there has long been a criticism that he simply delayed the inevitable. When the fossil fuels run out, modern agriculture will collapse.

Right now that is definitely true. It would be possible to evolve technologically to the point that it isn't, but so far that's been a slow slog.

There is a similar criticism to be made about present-day GMO tactics, and I allude to it in my OP: they buy temporary wins but are not sustainable due to selection effects and horizontal gene transfer diluting them over time. A lot of the ecological/sustainability crowd are basically arguing that we have to look for permanent solutions, not temporary gains, and that temporary gains have a way of degrading the environment in ways that make permanent solutions more difficult.

What it really boils down to is this:

http://citizenactionmonitor.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/worl...

If that graph doesn't scare the living shit out of you, you aren't thinking about it very deeply.

Is this a permanent shift, or is it a bubble? If it is a bubble, its collapse will result in suffering beyond our capacity to even imagine.

feelthepain2• 13 years ago

Apparently whether transgenes spread from GM crops to wild species remains controversial - though there have been some reports of this happening in the past. http://www.nature.com/news/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm-cr... >>In 2003, Snow and her colleagues showed that when Bt sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) were bred with their wild counterparts, transgenic offspring still required the same kind of close care as its cultivated parent but were less vulnerable to insects and produced more seeds than non-transgenic plants. Few similar studies have been conducted, says Snow, because the companies that own the rights to the technology are generally unwilling to let academic researchers perform the experiments.<<

Blahah2• 13 years ago

In this case, weedy rice (Oryza sativa f. spontanea) is actually just the same species as cultivated rice (O. sativa), and the two do interbreed freely (as per definition of species in plants).

sampo9• 13 years ago

Here's a comment I also left at the website:

I read the original article, and Wang et al. measure fitness by (i) measuring photosynthesis in glasshouse-grown plants (ii) measuring seed germination on wet paper in petri dishes and (iii) growing plants in garden (grown 20 cm apart, fertilized, hand-weeding and insecticides applied).

We probably can assume that the extra copies of EPSP synthase genes increase the metabolic throughput (by boosting some of the protein synthesis pathways) of the plants, and when grown in abundant light (20 cm apart, no shadowing and competition from neighbouring plants), water and nitrogen (grown in garden conditions, fertilized), it is plausible that these individual grow faster and larger. This is all that Wang et al. did and all that their article claims.

The higher throughput capacity only comes into use if supplies of energy or raw materials are not bottlenecks.

But the Nature News conclusions "effects of such modification have the potential to extend beyond farms and into the wild" and "genetic diversity [of wild rice], which is really important to conserve, could be threatened because the genotype with the transgene would outcompete the normal species" are very much unsupported by the results of Wang et al.

In the wild, seeds may need to germinate in more challenging conditions that wet paper on a petri dish, there may not be abundant light, nitrogen or water.

So the EPSP synthase -boosted plants grow better in the garden. But maybe there is a good reason why the EPSP synthase levels are lower in the plants from the wild. Maybe something else is more valuable to them, something that helps in e.g. low-light photosynthesis, nutrient or water uptake in scarce conditions, or defence against insects. Maybe the wild EPSP levels are just optimal for growing in wild conditions and the plants with boosted EPSP synthase levels would have lower fitness in wild conditions. (I assume that the higher levels of the synthase don't come for free, but have a related metabolic cost that cannot then be used elsewhere).

As Wang et al. only measured fitness in garden, not in the wild, the Nature News conclusions are unwarranted.

feelthepain2• 13 years ago

And Nature News have replied: As far as I can see, we have not reached any definitive conclusions about what will happen in the wild. The article warns what -could- happen and the -possible- consequences of such transgene spread. The sentence that you cite is a direct quote from Brian Ford-Lloyd, a plant geneticist at the University of Birmingham, UK (as the article clearly notes), who was unoconnected with the current study. He goes on to say: “This is one of the most clear examples of extremely plausible damaging effects [of GM crops] on the environment.” If you take issue with -his- conclusions, why not contact him? One of the key findings here is that, contrary to what many have argued, transgenes -may- confer some value/advantages to wild species. At least, this is no longer something that can be ruled out.

sampo9• 13 years ago

Yes I went there and replied to that, too.

Blahah2• 13 years ago

Thanks for your thoughtful comment sampo, I agree with all your points. The Nature News title is inflammatory and irresponsible.

jostmey• 13 years ago

There are so many things wrong with this article!

(1) The researchers did NOT observer genes crossing over from the GMO to the wild, weedy form of the rice in a Natural setting.

(2) The authors argue that the new genetic material, if it were to escape into the wild, would reduce genetic diversity and that this would be harmful. But by the very nature adding a new gene, genetic diversity has actually been increased.

sampo9• 13 years ago

"The researchers did NOT observer genes crossing over from the GMO to the wild, weedy form of the rice in a Natural setting."

What you say is true, they didn't observe than. But weedy rice (Oryza sativa f. spontanea) is the same species as rice (Oryza sativa), so gene crossing is not far-fetched, it's to be expected in any case.

fixxer2• 13 years ago

No real secret that this is happening. I've heard/seen the evidence from USDA-ARS and top agronomists from industry.

The reality is quite simple: our soils are going to end up looking a lot more like they did in the past (doused with nasty chemicals; stuff that will make environmentalists miss Roundup).

Despite the flaws of GMO crops, our soils in the Midwest are about as clean (in terms of pesticide/herbicide) as they've ever been during industrial agriculture. (Yes, yes, I realize the fertilizer situation is dire -- that is a separate problem and a massive area for research & innovation)

Agriculture is and always has been about chemical warfare. Plant and insects evolve over seasons. The only difference is that now humans are helping plants along. And yes, I emphasize "helping" because I see zero potential in non-GMO crops feeding humanity in the long run. It is one thing to grow tasty heirloom tomatoes in your yard and quite another to produce commodity grain at scale sufficient enough to meet global demand. I hear so many armchair environmentalists equate the two; very frustrating.

keithnoizu• 13 years ago

I don't know a few victory gardens and vertical farms could stretch things out for quite a ways before we need to fully switch to GMO in order to survive.

fixxer2• 13 years ago

For veg, sure. I'm all for it. Great way to teach and learn, as well. For example, squirrels aren't so cute after they destroy you entire tomato crop... lil' fuckers.

But grain is such a process and such an amazing supply chain. I don't see that being replicated.

Genetically modified crops pass benefits to weeds

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