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Asked by to Amelia, Clem, Izzy, Sarah on 17 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Isabel Webb answered on 17 Mar 2014:
Genetic modification is the process of putting a gene from one organism into the DNA of another. This involves a lot of stages – first you need to know what specific piece of DNA codes for a specific feature, then you need to insert that piece of DNA into another plant – we use a bacteria called agrobacterium to do this. You usually use a marker, such as resistance to an antibiotic, to select for plants which have the new DNA in them.
In theory, you could put a lot of genes from one plant into another to make a mixture of the two – but it would be very hard, very expensive and take a long time. You also have to be aware that it may not work every time, or the piece of DNA you put in might not have the desired effect. So it would be unlikely that we would use GM to try and combine two plants.
What we would probably do would be pick our favourite features from one plant and then put those features into another. One example is ‘purple tomatoes’ – where we use the beneficial chemicals found in fruit like blueberries, and put those into tomatoes. These chemicals help fight heart disease, but also improve taste and shelf life – which were unexpected side-effects! (GM is unpredictable!!!)
An easier way to combine two plants is grafting. This involves attaching roots of one plant to the shoots of another. This can only be done between related plants – like tomato and potato (did you know they are related?). This combination gave a ‘TomTato’ -here’s an article about them! (pretty cool right?) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24281192
One day GM technology and our knowledge might improve and let us combine two plants as you suggest – but lots more research is needed – and that’s why we need to encourage people like you to become scientists like us!!
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Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 17 Mar 2014:
If you take two different species of animal these are not able to combine and make a new one naturally. However, some plants are able to do this. When two plant species combine to make a new one it is called hybridization and there are quite a lot of examples of this that have occurred naturally in the wild. Some examples are peppermint (spearmint combined with water mint) and Grapefruit (pomelo combined with grapefruit).
Farmers have been breeding different plants together to make newer better versions for thousands of years now. None of the crop plants you eat today look anything like they would have maybe 1000 years ago before all these plants were combined together. This is still what farmers are doing today to make their crops better.
In terms of doing this in the laboratory using genetic engineering, in theory you could do this. However, it would be quite difficult, take a long time, and cost a lot of money. There would also be quite a high chance that it wouldn’t work properly and your plant would die or not work quite as you expected. At the moment when we make a GM plant, it is usually only one or two genes that are being added in or taken away. This way we can put the best features of one plant into another without getting any of the bad bits.
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