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Friday 4 March 2011

Cloning Plants are Beneficial (Jessica Foley)

As we may all know, if you cut a limb off of a plant, it can heal and grow back unlike humans. Therefore, you can easily clone a plant by cutting a piece of the stem or limb off, allow it to root, and place it in a soil medium. It is considered a clone because it has the same genetic make-up as the parent plant. However, scientists have discovered ways to clone a plant and make it beneficial. They found that by splicing (cutting pieces of new DNA and inserting it into an existing strand) specific genes into another plant can improve many different traits. In doing so, adding spliced genes into crop plants can make them disease-resistant, drought-tolerable, or even larger. Then all they have to do after they splice a specific gene into the plant is clone it. Now there are thousands of plants with the same disease-resistant gene that was spliced earlier into the original parent plant. It may seem like a lot of work, but most of the fruits and vegetables we eat today are genetically modified clones, unless the label reads "organic".
It is interesting to know that most of the fruits and vegetables we buy at a store are genetically modified, by splicing in a gene from another plant. This technique can help growers produce better and more reliable fruits and vegetables. However, I wonder how much it is costing the growers to splice in specific genes?

4 comments:

  1. I always thought that most of the fruits and vegetables we found in stores we sliced so they would be bigger and more colorful. Is that really healthier? Also, with all the pesticides and chemicals used now, is it really beneficial to get those vegetables found in store? I also wonder how beneficial it really is to the human body to eat foods that have been altered in such away.

    ~Kevin Reynolds

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  2. (to answer kevin's question)

    GMO plants aren't exactly healthier than the regular veggies and fruits. They are more economically valuble to farmers because most have been bred to resist herbicides and insects. Which means the farmer will spend less trying to protect his crop. And not to mention the definition of organic fruits and vegetables means to grow with out the use of herbicides and pesticides. And one of the articles I read also mentioned that its hard to create new GMOs in agriculture because the regulations are so sttict. To keep my answer short I think way more research needs to be done before and exact answer can be provided.
    ------RJT

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  3. Dr. Aylesworth has compaired the benefits of consuming organic foods. From what I understand, there is no known research suggesting that there are health benefits from consuming organic products. What do you think? Did your article talk about the harmful effects of eating genetically modified foods?

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  4. (to answer above question)
    There have been many tests conducted on genetically modified plants. If there were any harmful effects to humans, then the FDA wouldn't have approved of GMOs and the fruits and vegetables wouldn't be available to us at stores. I believe organic products are better for our health, in the case that they have naturally evolved antioxidents and nutrients.
    By: Jessica Foley

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