• Question: what was the first GM plant?

    Asked by wookiee to Amelia, Izzy, Sarah on 19 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      The first GM plant was a tobacco plant which was resistant to an antibiotic, and was in 1983!

      I am guessing that the reason this was the first GM plant was that tobacco plants are easy to modify, we still use GM tobacco plants in the lab as a tool for finding out what a gene does or where in the cell it is expressed using fluorescent protein to label it. There is a system where you use plant infecting bacteria (Agrobacterium) to express the genes in the plant and they will be there for around 3 days which lets you study them before being ‘silenced’ by the plant.

      The original study was reported here if you’re interested!
      http://www.pnas.org/content/80/15/4803.full.pdf

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      I don’t know what the first gm plant was – but I can tell you about the first one that people got really upset about – the first one to come to the market.

      This was a type of tomato whose skin was easy to break down. This was good for roving a lot lf waste in the tomato purée industry. However, the media made a lot of fuss about these – calling them ‘Frankenstein foods’. People still remember this and the Frankenstein phrase and it is a big problem for convincing the public how great gm is.

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      I don’t actually know, but I should think that the first GM plant was a very unexciting plant called Thale Cress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabidopsis_thaliana

      This cress is what most plant scientists do their lab work on to learn how to do new things because it is small, and easy to grow and work with. Once we understand how to do things in Thale Cress we then transfer this same knowledge and techniques to use in other more complex species. A bit like the way medicines are tested on rats before they go to humans.

      I expect that scientists invented GM techniques and learnt them on thale cress before transferring this knowledge to more useful plants such as the tomato and tobacco that the others have mentioned.

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