Can GMOs fight hunger in the face of climate change?

More people die annually from chronic hunger than from HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Many of the world’s hungry live in developing countries, so increasing the food supply in impoverished regions would be an efficient way to ease suffering and save lives. A warming global climate, however, threatens to exacerbate local food shortages by increasing the frequency and duration of crop-crippling droughts.

Genetic engineers are currently developing new drought-resistant crops. Unfortunately, current GM drought-resistant crops typically fare no better in dry conditions than do drought-resistant crops that have been developed via selective breeding. Complex traits like drought resistance are typically determined by more than one or two pieces of genetic code. Present-day research has not precisely identified the combination of genes that allows crops to thrive in arid conditions, so these crops have likely not yet reached their full potential.

Plummeting research costs, however, will likely allow genetic engineers to modify more complex traits in the years to come. This will lead to an expansion of our molecular toolkit for combating hunger as we draw connections between traits and specific genes, such as those that successfully confer drought resistance to selectively bred crops.

Drought resistance is not the only trait that could help fight hunger in the face of climate change. Researchers have develop a new rice strain that contains a gene that transfers growth away from the roots and towards the parts of the plant that humans can actually eat. The resulting GM rice produces 43% more grain and emits up to 97 percent less methane than conventional rice does.

Other promising GM crops of the not-so-distant future include flood-resistant rice, maize that can grow in nitrogen-poor soil, and potatoes that can immunize consumers against hepatitis B infection. Some of these ideas remain science fiction for the moment, but overwhelming evidence has already shown that changing food on the molecular level can help to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post:Feeding the World One Genetically Modified Tomato at a Time: A Scientific Perspective

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