Recently a lot of people are rising against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). A new research project has begun sequencing massive amounts of crops in order to figure out how to cross-breed certain plants to cultivate the most desirable crops– completely voiding the need for genetically modifying anything at all.

The issue lays in the fact that farmers only use crops that yield the most product. By only cultivating to the most desirable plant you forego all of the other beneficial genes within the other species of that particular plant.

By sequencing massive amounts of plant DNA scientists can guide farmers in cross breeding for the most genetically wholesome plants. For example, there are 24 species of rice and 500,000 varieties of rice within those species. Previous to today’s technology gene sequencing was quiet expensive, but now it is not– well only 1.5 million dollars…

Personally, I hope that we can cultivate to the most substantially sustaining foods. There is enough food on the earth to feed everyone approximately 2000 calories daily. Wouldn’t it be nice to increase the nutritional value of food, and encourage farming in other countries to potentiate the end of world hunger?

Conversely to this method of cross breeding are GMOs. A lot of people are giving GMOs a bad wrap recently from the organization called Mansanto because their practices are considered negligent at best. An example of a creation done by Mansanto is the use of Bacillus thuringiensis (BT) in Corn which is a bacteria that has the equivalent effect as insecticide. When humans eat GMO Corn that has (BT) in it their stomach bile is mutated to be round-up proof. Since the Bacteria Genome is close in length to that of animals our DNA can mutate each others– which is how our stomach bile becomes round-up proof!

The difference is that the database is, quite literally, the DNA of various crop strains and the search is executed using biochemistry. Armed with the answers to their queries, breeders can know whether it’s worth growing that seed and which of thousands of other seeds to cross it with.

Citation:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/massive-gene-sequencing-of-thousands-of.html