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The result is a nutritionally rich food that could benefit millions worldwide, while also reducing the cost of animal feed. The breakthrough came in a report in the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal. Researchers say the process involves infusing corn with a certain type of bacteria in order to produce methionine, an amino acid generally found in meat. "We improved the nutritional value of corn, the largest commodity crop grown on Earth," Thomas Leustek, professor in the Department of Plant Biology at Rutgers University and co-author of the study, told VOA. "Most corn is used for animal feed, but it lacks methionine -- a key amino acid -- and we found an effective way to add it."
A dry field of corn is seen near Fremont, Nebraska.
The new method works by adding an E. coli bacteria into the genome of the corn plant, which then causes the methionine production in the plants leaves. According to the study, methionine in the corn kernels then increases by about 57 percent. The scientists fed the genetically modified corn to chickens at Rutgers University in order to show it was nutritious for them, co-author Joachim Messing said. Normally, chicken feed is prepared as a corn-soybean mixture, the authors said in a press release, but the mixture lacks methionine. "Methionine is added because animals won't grow without it. In many developing countries where corn is a staple, methionine is also important for people, especially children. It's vital nutrition, like a vitamin,” Messing said.
If the genetically modified corn can be successfully deployed, those who live in developing countries “wouldn't have to purchase methionine supplements or expensive foods that have higher methionine," Leustek said.
US Researchers Genetically Modify Corn to Boost Nutritional Value
In February, António Guterres warned that 20 million people were facing starvation in South Sudan, Somalia, North East Nigeria and Yemen, and he appealed for more than $5.6 billion for 2017. “While we have succeeded in keeping famine at bay, we have not kept suffering at bay,” Guterres told a U.N. Security Council meeting Thursday on the issue. He said while the international community responded quickly, and nearly 70 percent of the required funds have been received, lack of access has hampered distribution. “In the past nine months, the need for humanitarian aid has increased in these four areas,” the U.N. chief said.
Yanut Ayuel, 2nd left, sits with her family at the displaced persons' camp where she lives in Abayok, South Sudan
Guterres said conflict is the major force driving these food crises. “Until these conflicts are resolved and development takes root, communities and entire regions will continue to be ravaged by hunger and suffering,” he added. The U.N. says in South Sudan alone, the number of people deemed severely food insecure has risen by a million this year to 6 million. In Boko Haram-affected areas of northeast Nigeria, there are 8.5 million people who require humanitarian assistance.
In Somalia, where drought and insecurity are obstacles, more than 6 million people depend on aid for their survival. And in conflict-wracked Yemen, a staggering 17 million people are food insecure. Hunger also is fueling outbreaks of cholera, malaria and measles, and adding to the migration and refugee crisis across the globe. Security Council members expressed continued frustration with actors on the ground hampering aid and threatening those delivering it.
U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said there is no excuse for delaying aid deliveries. “All members of the council and the international community must come together to hold all actors on the ground accountable,” she said. “When they block aid, we have to call them out.” “Yes, we need more funding; yes, we need more access; but this will not end these crises or stop new ones from emerging,” said Swedish envoy Carl Skau. “There must be political solutions to the conflicts that are driving these entirely preventable humanitarian crises.”
UN Chief: Worldwide Famine Averted, but Numbers of Hungry Growing
CRISPR is a feature of the bacterial defense system. The microbes use it like a molecular pair of scissors, to precisely snip out viral infections in their DNA. Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, California, are using CRISPR to manipulate plant DNA. Managing director, Susan Jenkins, says the technique is so much faster and precise than other plant transformation methods, it will likely increase the speed of creating new plant varieties by years, if not decades. “What CRISPR is going to allow,” she explains, “is for us to go in and make these changes, and then within one generation of the plant actually have the trait we want.”
Rust-resistant wheat
While CRISPR speeds up plant breeding, Jenkins says it’s not a magic wand — changing a plant takes a lot of steps. She points to the Institute’s efforts to develop a wheat variety that resists a fungal rust that can reduce yields by nearly 50 percent. First, scientists had to figure out just which gene was making the wheat vulnerable to fungal rust. Then they used CRISPR to remove that gene. “So in this case, we use CRISPR to actually knock out a gene that is in the wheat,” Jenkins says. And because “snipping out” a gene does not add foreign material to a plant, last week, the USDA ruled that gene-changing methods like this do not require special regulatory approval.
Wheat leaf rust occurs worldwide wherever wheat is grown, and is one of the most economically significant fungal diseases in wheat and other cereal crops.
Plant transformation expert Myeong-Je Cho says they started with a single gene-edited rust-resistant wheat cell, and grew it in the lab into wheat “clones” for further testing. After just over a year, some clones are now stalks of wheat, and Cho adds, “we have grownup plants in the greenhouse,” complete with normal stalks and robust seed heads. While the Institute introduced no foreign genetic material into the wheat, CRISPR technology can also be used to introduce genes, even genes from other species, as is done with more traditional GMO crops. However, in standard GMO techniques, scientists use a “shotgun” approach to force new genes into a plant’s DNA in random places. Then, they choose which random change is most likely to grow healthy plants. In contrast, CRISPR is used when scientists want to add a specific gene at a specific location in the DNA. CRISPR offers that level of precision.
Protecting cacao trees
The bacterial gene known as Cas9 evolved to snip viruses out of bacterial DNA. Now Institute scientists want to use it to fight a virus that’s attacking cacao trees in West Africa. The swollen shoot virus evolved in other plants, then, half a century ago, “jumped species” to cacao trees, which it can kill in just three years. So Jenkins says, the Institute is working to add virus resistance to cacao tree DNA, by inserting the Cas9 resistance gene. After all, she says, “If the bacteria have already evolved this to fight this viral infection, we are just going to take that mechanism and put it directly into the plant.”
Plant scientist Myeong-Je Cho examines cacao trees in the IGI greenhouse. His team is using CRISPR to develop strains that will resist infection.
The Institute plans to start growing cacao trees resistant to swollen shoot virus within a year. That is fast, according to Institute Science Director, Brian Staskawicz. He points out, “What this technology can do is to allow us work with the elite cultivars of a plant and basically change them for drought resistance and cold tolerance and disease resistance in a more rapid fashion than classical plant breeding.” Staskawicz says that modifying cacao tree DNA is an exciting project from a technical standpoint, because cacao plants are unusually difficult to clone and genetically transform.
Public attitudes towards genetically modified crops
