Five years after developing an apple variety containing a defense to fend off apple scab — which took 85 years of conventional breeding — the disease has evolved, and apple trees are becoming infected again.
Even armed with modern breeding techniques, it would take another 40 years to breed a resistant strain conventionally, says Henk Schouten, a plant scientist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
So instead, Schouten has joined a small pool of academics and companies hoping to take advantage of the latest engineering approaches, while avoiding the lengthy and expensive burden of government regulation. Because he wants to insert DNA only from related apple varieties, Schouten argues that his product should not be regulated in the same way as crops engineered with bacterial or viral DNA.
Read the full, original story here: “US regulation misses some GM crops”
