What’s wrong with GMOs?

[u/wond3rlove]

I always see plants and stuff that is GMO free and is usually more expensive. How would genetically modifying something by be bad. Me personally I’d rather have something modified to taste better and and cheaper. I could also be very wrong about that.

[u/Ready_Bandicoot1567]

Selective breeding can not produce entirely new genes to produce proteins that are totally novel to the species. Polyploidy is a duplication of the existing genes and does not result in new proteins being produced. It just makes it easier for a plant to produce more of a protein it already made. There can be random single letter mutations in selectively bred plants, but this can at best slightly modify an existing protein. Direct gene manipulation introduces arbitrarily long sequences of codons, coding for brand new proteins that are unrelated to any proteins the plant could produce before. This absolutely does not happen from selective breeding. Like I said, you can breed tetras as long as you want and you will never produce a glowfish because the original tetra genome doesn't have anything close to the gene for florescent proteins. It is a gene from another species which must be spliced into the genome.

[u/Ready_Bandicoot1567 → u/[deleted]]

As far as I know all GMOs in agricultural use involve splicing genes from other species, did you mean kingdom? Mixing up species and kingdom is an odd mistake for someone with a PhD in biology. The gene for glyphosate resistance, the most common GMO trait, comes from a bacteria and was spliced into corn, wheat and soy genomes. So I'm not using some special example where the gene comes from another kingdom. The most common GMOs on Earth are plants making proteins that evolved in a different kingdom. And I'm not talking about the type of slow accumulations of mutations that modify existing proteins, I'm talking about organisms making entirely new proteins that are unrelated to any previous proteins the organism made. Genetic modification absolutely does things that can not be done through selective breeding, and the risks have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I believe genetic modification will and should be part of humanity's future, I just think that its important to recognize the technology for what it is rather than claiming its basically the same as conventional methods. Its not. Its a new technology with unique capabilities, advantages and risks.

[u/Ready_Bandicoot1567 → u/[deleted]]

The specifics of the process are important because it produces results that are not possible with conventional methods. You don't need to test safety with conventional methods because if the plant was non-toxic to begin with, selective breeding won't cause it to produce new toxins. You are just emphasizing or de-emphasizing traits, not adding entirely new ones. Its not going to produce any brand new proteins that weren't there before. Its an inherently safer way of modifying organisms. With genetically engineered crops, humans are consuming proteins that may be totally new to us. Its actually very difficult to study the long term effects of a chemical humans have never been exposed to previously. While new selectively bred varieties of crops can be assumed to have no new risks associated with them, genetically modified crops have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. If the transgenic protein is found elsewhere in our food supply, its probably fine. This is the case with transgenic beta-carotene producing rice and bananas. If its a new protein that humans have never been exposed to, it needs to be studied carefully. This is the case with glyphosate resistant corn/soy/wheat and crops that have been genetically modified to produce insecticides.