• Question: Would it be possible to genetically modify a plant in such a way so that we could make it produce whatever we wish?

    Asked by to Sarah, Izzy, Clem, Amelia on 18 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      We would first need to identify a different living thing that already made the thing we desire – and it can be anything, not just a plant.

      If a single gene from the organism is needed to make what we want, it should be quite easy to try and GM it into a plant. However, it is rarely this simple. Most chemicals made in biology are complicated, and need a whole pathway of reactions and different genes to do this. They also need even more genes to act as activators for those genes, and might even need EVEN MORE genes to repress other reactions that might also happen at the same time. The plant we put all these into might lack other genes that we don’t realise are important! So it would be pretty difficult. And take a really really long time to work out.

      The best thing to do is find a plant that makes a similar chemical to the one we want, and then try and find a sin le gene in another organism that would edit the existing chemical to make it into what we want. People where I work are already doing that using Madagascan periwinkle, a plant that makes cancer treatments. They are trying to GM it to make even better cancer treatment chemicals.

    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      This is a cool concept but I think the answer is yes this is likely to be possible at some point in the future! Although it will be much easier if it’s something that’s produced naturally and we can just port the genes into a different species and let the plant do the work! As Izzy said though, this is likely to be troublesome due to the complexity of the pathways involved, for example there are probably many different enzymes and regulatory proteins which control synthesis of chemicals.

      I think the first step is understanding exactly how things are made, and that’s where Chemists come in, then we can use this knowledge to get plants to make them, there is some pretty incredible technology being developed at the moment! 🙂

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      Your genes are actually a code that your body reads to produce proteins. The proteins that are made are what make up your whole body. Different species are different because they have different genes, which code for different proteins.

      This means that theoretically you could genetically modify a plant to produce any PROTEIN you wished. You could just insert a piece of DNA, or a gene, that would code for that protein, and the plant would make it. Of course you couldn’t modify the plant to produce any protein that might be harmful to it as this would just destroy the plant.

      I don’t think it will be possible to modify a plat to produce things other than proteins though…

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      depends on what you wish for 😛

      But I would like to say yes, within reason, but even then then we may still be surprised!

      This is one of the many reason why plant science has an exciting future ahead of it!

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