6 ms·

How do you guarantee that this DNA will not get released into the wild, and what is your responsibility for the consequences if it does?

by kourt 12y ago

sampo 12y ago
> How do you guarantee that this DNA will not get released into the wild, and what is your responsibility for the consequences if it does? Don't be silly. It's only in movies that monsterous mutations appear. What consequences could this kind of useless, extra metabolical burden (luminescence) have? It would quickly disappear in nature.
johnpmayer 12y ago
Honestly I wouldn't be upset if the truth was none and none. May as well be happening in the open. edit: If I got these I'd be breeding it with all sorts of other close species; see what sticks.
api 12y ago
Not the op, but I have an answer to this. This plant is wasting energy by glowing. It serves no purpose that enhances the plant's fitness outside of a human environment. If it were released into the wild, chances are it would lose out in natural selection vs wild competitors. The same is true of most human domesticated species, most of which are effectively genetically engineered through ages of selective breeding. Picture dogs vs wolves, cows vs wild buffalo, etc.
- technotony 12y ago
  Exactly, the plant is not being given any kind of selective advantage and the genes in fact incur a metabolic cost on the plant so it will lose out to natural selection. The domesticated analogy is a great one, plus remember we took the genes from the wild in the first place!
  - gone35 12y ago
    Exactly, (...) Seriously? As the CEO of the company and the person ultimately responsible for this project, it is troubling that you endorse these simplistic and erroneous views of plant biosafety. Fitness is notoriously ecosystem-dependent and hard to predict, which is why microcosm and field experiments-based risk assessments exist in the first place --it unfortunately can't just be eyeballed from a simple metabolic account like that. And either way there is the additional risk of transgene flow, which is even more long-term and less understood --especially for such relatively distant horizontal transfers. You might have (unaccountably) skirted APHIS regulation, but that doesn't mean you don't have an ethical obligation to (1) thoroughly assess the biosafety of these plants; and (2) be frank in communicating these risks (and their uncertainty) to the public, even if they do not make as clean of a narrative as one would like.
    - technotony 12y ago
      One of the things we try to do with this project is simplify things so that people can more clearly understand. Intuitively it's not clear why there are risk from our work (beyond the unknown unknowns). We have engaged in a number of panels with expert ecologists and after one an MIT professor asked why we were always talking about glowing plants as there were no serious risks here. You can read one of the reports here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/SYNBIO_res_agenda.pdf http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/SYNBIO_res_a... Also, specifically to your point about transgene flow. Higher level organisms (eg animals, plants) very very rarely exchange DNA - this is a good thing or else you might start photosynthesizing after eating salad for lunch. There are a couple of recent papers saying maybe (and that's maybe in a scientific probability, ie small probability) this happens on the order of millions of years. APHIS doesn't even look at this issue anymore, here's their comment on it: Potential impacts from transferring genetic information from plant to organisms with which it cannot interbreed • First, many genomes (or parts thereof) have been sequenced from bacteria that are closely associated with plants including Agrobacterium and Rhizobium (Kaneko et al. 2000; Wood et al. 2001; Kaneko et al. 2002). There is no evidence that these organisms contain genes derived from plants. • Second, in cases where review of sequence data implied that horizontal gene transfer occurred, these events are believed to occur on an evolutionary time scale on the order of millions of years (Koonin et al. 2001; Brown 2003). • Third, transgene DNA promoters and coding sequences are optimized for plant expression, not prokaryotic bacterial expression. Thus even if horizontal gene transfer occurred, proteins corresponding to the transgenes are not likely to be produced. • Fourth, the FDA has evaluated horizontal gene transfer from the use of antibiotic resistance marker genes, and concluded that the likelihood of transfer of antibiotic resistance genes from plant genomes to microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract of humans or animals, or in the environment, is remote (Council for Biotechnology Information, 2001; http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opa-armg.html http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opa-armg.html, accessed 1/26/10). • Finally, a recent review of issues related to horizontal gene transfer concluded that this type of gene transfer is unlikely to occur and poses negligible risks to human health or the environment (Keese 2008).

How do you guarantee that this DNA will not get released into the wild, and what is your responsibility for the consequences if it does?

by kourt 12y ago

How do you guarantee that this DNA will not get released into the wild, and what is your responsibility for the consequences if it does?

sampo 12y ago

> How do you guarantee that this DNA will not get released into the wild, and what is your responsibility for the consequences if it does? Don't be silly. It's only in movies that monsterous mutations appear. What consequences could this kind of useless, extra metabolical burden (luminescence) have? It would quickly disappear in nature.

johnpmayer 12y ago

Honestly I wouldn't be upset if the truth was none and none. May as well be happening in the open. edit: If I got these I'd be breeding it with all sorts of other close species; see what sticks.

api 12y ago

Not the op, but I have an answer to this. This plant is wasting energy by glowing. It serves no purpose that enhances the plant's fitness outside of a human environment. If it were released into the wild, chances are it would lose out in natural selection vs wild competitors. The same is true of most human domesticated species, most of which are effectively genetically engineered through ages of selective breeding. Picture dogs vs wolves, cows vs wild buffalo, etc.

technotony 12y ago
Exactly, the plant is not being given any kind of selective advantage and the genes in fact incur a metabolic cost on the plant so it will lose out to natural selection. The domesticated analogy is a great one, plus remember we took the genes from the wild in the first place!
- gone35 12y ago
  Exactly, (...) Seriously? As the CEO of the company and the person ultimately responsible for this project, it is troubling that you endorse these simplistic and erroneous views of plant biosafety. Fitness is notoriously ecosystem-dependent and hard to predict, which is why microcosm and field experiments-based risk assessments exist in the first place --it unfortunately can't just be eyeballed from a simple metabolic account like that. And either way there is the additional risk of transgene flow, which is even more long-term and less understood --especially for such relatively distant horizontal transfers. You might have (unaccountably) skirted APHIS regulation, but that doesn't mean you don't have an ethical obligation to (1) thoroughly assess the biosafety of these plants; and (2) be frank in communicating these risks (and their uncertainty) to the public, even if they do not make as clean of a narrative as one would like.
  - technotony 12y ago
    One of the things we try to do with this project is simplify things so that people can more clearly understand. Intuitively it's not clear why there are risk from our work (beyond the unknown unknowns). We have engaged in a number of panels with expert ecologists and after one an MIT professor asked why we were always talking about glowing plants as there were no serious risks here. You can read one of the reports here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/SYNBIO_res_agenda.pdf http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/SYNBIO_res_a... Also, specifically to your point about transgene flow. Higher level organisms (eg animals, plants) very very rarely exchange DNA - this is a good thing or else you might start photosynthesizing after eating salad for lunch. There are a couple of recent papers saying maybe (and that's maybe in a scientific probability, ie small probability) this happens on the order of millions of years. APHIS doesn't even look at this issue anymore, here's their comment on it: Potential impacts from transferring genetic information from plant to organisms with which it cannot interbreed • First, many genomes (or parts thereof) have been sequenced from bacteria that are closely associated with plants including Agrobacterium and Rhizobium (Kaneko et al. 2000; Wood et al. 2001; Kaneko et al. 2002). There is no evidence that these organisms contain genes derived from plants. • Second, in cases where review of sequence data implied that horizontal gene transfer occurred, these events are believed to occur on an evolutionary time scale on the order of millions of years (Koonin et al. 2001; Brown 2003). • Third, transgene DNA promoters and coding sequences are optimized for plant expression, not prokaryotic bacterial expression. Thus even if horizontal gene transfer occurred, proteins corresponding to the transgenes are not likely to be produced. • Fourth, the FDA has evaluated horizontal gene transfer from the use of antibiotic resistance marker genes, and concluded that the likelihood of transfer of antibiotic resistance genes from plant genomes to microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract of humans or animals, or in the environment, is remote (Council for Biotechnology Information, 2001; http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opa-armg.html http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opa-armg.html, accessed 1/26/10). • Finally, a recent review of issues related to horizontal gene transfer concluded that this type of gene transfer is unlikely to occur and poses negligible risks to human health or the environment (Keese 2008).