Gen Technologie stolpert über die eigenen Füße - und fällt

... its current whiz-bang seeds offer justtarted-up versions of the same old traits it has been peddling for morethan a decade: herbicide tolerance and pest resistance. Meanwhile,judging from the company's recent report on its latest quarterly earnings, the "blockbuster" traits it has been promising for years -- droughtresistance and nitrogen-use efficiency -- don't seem to be coming alongvery well.....

It isone thing to splice a particular trait like herbicide or pesticideresistance into the corn genome. You isolate the gene in an organismlike Bt that kills insects, splice it into the corn genome, and watch itexpress itself.

But transforming a crop's way of taking up water and fertilizer -- thegoal of engineering crops that can withstand drought and use nitrogenmore efficiently -- are infinitely more complex. These intricateprocesses developed through millions of years of evolution. They don'tinvolve a single gene, but rather groups of genes interacting in waysthat are little understood. Andas the Union of Concerned Scientist's Gurian-Sherman told me in aninterview, in the process of achieving a complex trait likedrought resistance, breeders often generate unintended traits, such assusceptibility to disease. These are known as "pleiotropic effects" --simply the idea that changing one aspect of a thing can create multiple,unpredictable effects. Pleiotropy is the scourge of GMO breederslooking to create the nextgeneration of miracle transgenic seeds.

In his 2009 paper No Sure Fix [PDF], Gurian-Sherman shows that attempts to create nitrogen-efficient GM seeds that actually work well in the field have so far failed -- andthat conventional breeders have actually managed to generatesignificant gains in nitrogen-use efficiency in the field withoutresorting to transgenic methods.

Der ganze Artikel:
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-10-12-what-monsantos-fall-from-grace-reveals-abo-the-gmo-seed-industry/