Mapping Of Arabidopsis Could Lead To New Generation Of Hybrid Plants

i work as an IT for this lab. interesting stuff:

http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/dangl/lab/

You do realise that almost every piece of food you eat is genetically modified? I'm not a big ban of the genetic manipulation described in the article, but genetic engineering has created almost every foodstuff you eat, like:

Apples
Corn
Tomatoes
Wheat

etc....

And don't forget the family dog, he's been genetically engineered too.

cross breeding and genetic engineering are two different things

in nature the gene of an animal would never wind up in a plant

They're talking about crossing the genes from a mustard weed with rice and other plants. They used genetic analysis to determine which genes were useful and needed to be transferred, but other than that there is little here that is new. We've been crossbreeding plants for millenia to develop new strains and species.

what created corn, apples and wheat isn't "cross breeding," but a type of genetic engineering called "selective breeding."

And this article never said anything about animal genes winding up in plants....

And you're wrong there anyway! Gene fragments can be transfered from animals to plants by way of viruses and bacteria...

applied to many different things that it lacks any rigorous meaning.

nevertheless, there is no doubt that Mother Nature is by far the biggest genetic engineer out there.

as dinoboy points out, she has supplied mechanisms for trans-kingdom (i.e. animal to plant, or vice versa) gene trasfers to occur. and if you want to believe that because mother nature is involved, these transfers are benign - well, you couldn't be more mistaken. for example such trans-kingdom gene transfer via HIV causes AIDS and via the papiloma (sp?) virus causes cancer. (there are many more examples).

another "genetic engineering" mechanism in play by mother nature is the propensity for the development of genetic diversity. already there have been over 1.8 million SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms) detected in human genes. what that means is that there are not ~30,000 different human genes, but when all the variants of each gene are considered, there are millions (and new ones are constantly appearing). the implication for this incredible genetic diversity is that if you eat a corn or beef product (to give but two examples) the corn plant or cow that these foods come from likely contained a few new forms of genes that had never been tested before. it surprises me that the anti-gm food crowd, who use the lack of complete testing of gm crops as an endless talking point, eat anything at all, especially natural foods that contain much greater (untested!!) genetic diversity than laboratory-derived cloned or gm plants or animals.