The end of the GMO taboo - rapid changes coming to our gardens and landscapes

With very little fanfare, the USDA has put GMO products directly into the hands of hobbyist gardeners.

Anyone in the mainland US can now order the bioluminescent petunia, which was created by inserting genes from a mushroom into a petunia. The company that created them, light.bio, has already sold thousands of them to different farmers.

Tomatoes with a deep purple flesh were first developed over 15 years ago by Professor Cathie Martin and her lab. They make use of two genes from a snapdragon to produce anthocyanins. Humans have been selecting for high anthocyanin foods (like black corn) for many generations because we have an instinct that these are good for us. In the case of the tomatoes, they do not just look interesting, but they have a vastly increased shelf-life. This year was the first year that home gardeners could order seeds for these tomatoes and these tomatoes are already in stores in parts of the US.

Consumers have already been ingesting a few genetically modified crops for over a decade. Papaya production in the US was almost completely destroyed by ringspot virus. It wasn’t until a group of scientists from Cornell created a resistant papaya with genes from the virus inserted directly into the cells that papaya production could be restored. And given that “over 90 percent of U.S. corn, upland cotton, and soybeans are produced using GE varieties”, it is likely that nearly everyone in the US has consumed something with modified genetic origins.

There are many traditional seed savers in the US who do their best to ensure the lineage of their plants. I try to learn from everyone, and have spent many hours talking to people who are convinced that the spread of genetically modified plants will have disastrous consequences for everyone.

Scientists have looked towards genetic modification for preservation purposes as well. The American chestnut used to make up a large proportion of forests in the South and East Coast of the US. Their numbers rapidly declined in a few decades to miniscule fraction of their original population (less than 0.5%) due to a blight that destroys mature trees. Efforts to produce blight-resistant selections of the American chestnut go back over 100 years, though there has been little success with that (I have a few seedlings from one such effort). There are a few teams that have worked to produce genetically modified trees, with genes taken from wheat, that can resist the blight. The idea is that these trees could be spread in forests where the occasional stump sprout of an infected tree produces pollen and that the progeny will have resistance and that genetic diversity can be preserved. That work has faced some hurdles over the last few years but it is likely that some of these candidates will be cleared soon for future planting. Apart from restoring these tasty chestnuts as a food source (for humans and animals), these trees formed important parts of the ecosystem, and restoring them in forests can bring back other species (such as hawthorn) that have been changed by the large amounts of humans that have settled their native environment.

One of the uses I am most interested in is the potential in improving forestry products and carbon sequestration. A team at North Carolina State University recently demonstrated how they were able to use machine learning to find combinations of genes that make poplars much more useful for processing. Poplars are commonly used to create shade and windbreaks. They are robust trees that grow quickly and can be found in urban landscaping throughout the world (especially the “Lombardy Poplar”). One of the more interesting start-ups to me is Living Carbon, which produces poplars with genes that are optimized for fast growth, which is a biological equivalent to better understanding and improving photosynthesis.

While poplars work well in temperate regions, this work also needs to expand for hotter environments that are warming quickly. Mass planting of shade trees can help combat desertification by keeping water closer to the ground. One exciting option to research is the Inga genus, which grows quickly and is effective at fixing nitrogen in the ground. I am particularly interested in research that enables palm trees to grow faster. I would love to see large specimens of Jubaea chilensis and other palms growing far outside of their range. As someone who has climbed precarious ledges off of trails to observe populations of plants that differed by something as simple as color, I look forward to seeing the work that has been done in generating new flower colors (like in petunias) spreading to more genuses, and for the new colors that will come (I can’t wait to see what we do with Alstroemeriaceae!).

As we understand more about genomes and modifying them (with tools like CRISPR), there will likely be less anxiety about foods that are genetically modified. I remember watching the controversy over the purple tomatoes erupt with a beloved organic seed company, and I couldn’t help but imagine the view of this saga from a future where we everyone had easy access to datasets of many genomes. Novel foods, produced with processes like precision fermentation, require genetic engineering, and as the potential for those get realized, it is likely that regulatory agencies will move much quicker.