-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 29, 2007 4:25:08 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Evolutionary Russian Roulette: Gambling with DNA, Hoping
for "Useful" Mutations
Useful Mutants, Bred With Radiation
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times, August 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html?
_r=2&8dpc=&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
VIENNA — Pierre Lagoda pulled a small container from his pocket and
spilled the contents onto his desk. Four tiny dice rolled to a stop.
“That’s what nature does,” Dr. Lagoda said. The random results of
the dice, he explained, illustrate how spontaneous mutations create
the genetic diversity that drives evolution and selective breeding.
He rolled the dice again. This time, he was mimicking what he and
his colleagues have been doing quietly around the globe for more
than a half-century — using radiation to scramble the genetic
material in crops. That process has produced valuable mutants like
red grapefruit, disease-resistant cocoa and premium barley for
Scotch whiskey.
“I’m doing the same thing,” he said, still toying with the dice.
“I’m not doing anything different from what nature does. I’m not
using anything that was not in the genetic material itself.”
Dr. Lagoda, the head of plant breeding and genetics at the
International Atomic Energy Agency, prides himself on being a good
salesman. It can be a tough act, however, given wide public fears
about the dangers of radiation and the risks of genetically
manipulated food. His work combines both fields but has nonetheless
managed to thrive.
The process leaves no residual radiation or other obvious marks of
human intervention. It simply creates offspring that exhibit new
characteristics.
Though poorly known, radiation breeding has produced thousands of
useful mutants and a sizable fraction of the world’s crops, Dr.
Lagoda said, including varieties of rice, wheat, barley, pears,
peas, cotton, peppermint, sunflowers, peanuts, grapefruit, sesame,
bananas, cassava and sorghum. The mutant wheat is used for bread
and pasta and the mutant barley for beer and fine whiskey.
The mutations can improve yield, quality, taste, size and
resistance to disease and can help plants adapt to diverse climates
and conditions.
Dr. Lagoda takes pains to distinguish the little-known radiation
work from the contentious field of genetically modified crops,
sometimes disparaged as “Frankenfood.” That practice can splice
foreign genetic material into plants, creating exotic varieties
grown widely in the United States but often feared and rejected in
Europe. By contrast, radiation breeding has made few enemies.
“Spontaneous mutations are the motor of evolution,” Dr. Lagoda
said. “We are mimicking nature in this. We’re concentrating time
and space for the breeder so he can do the job in his lifetime. We
concentrate how often mutants appear — going through 10,000 to one
million — to select just the right one.”
Radiation breeding is widely used in the developing world, thanks
largely to the atomic agency’s efforts. Beneficiaries have included
Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Egypt, Ghana, India,
Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Sri Lanka, Sudan,
Thailand and Vietnam.
Politically, the method is one of many quid pro quos the agency, an
arm of the United Nations in Vienna, offers client states. Its own
agenda is to inspect ostensibly peaceful atomic installations in an
effort to find and deter secret work on nuclear weapons.
Plant scientists say radiation breeding could play an important
role in the future. By promoting crop flexibility, it could help
feed billions of added mouths despite shrinking land and water,
rising oil and fertilizer costs, increasing soil exhaustion,
growing resistance of insects to pesticides and looming climate
change. Globally, food prices are already rising fast.
“It’s not going to solve the world food crisis,” said J. Neil
Rutger, former director of the Dale Bumpers National Rice Research
Center in Stuttgart, Ark. “But it will help. Modern plant breeders
are using every tool they can get.”
The method was discovered some 80 years ago when Lewis J. Stadler
of the University of Missouri used X-rays to zap barley seeds. The
resulting plants were white, yellow, pale yellow and some had white
stripes — nothing of any practical value.
But the potential was clear. Soon, by exposing large numbers of
seeds and young plants, scientists produced many more mutations and
found a few hidden beneficial ones. Peanuts got tougher hulls.
Barley, oats and wheat got better yields. Black currants grew.
The process worked because the radiation had randomly mixed up the
genetic material of the plants. The scientists could control the
intensity of the radiation and thus the extent of the disturbance,
but not the outcome. To know the repercussions, they had to plant
the radiated material, let it grow and examine the results. Often,
the gene scrambling killed the seeds and plants, or left them with
odd mutations. But in a few instances, the process made beneficial
traits.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States government promoted the
method as part of its “atoms for peace” program and had notable
successes. In 1960, disease heavily damaged the bean crop in
Michigan — except for a promising new variety that had been made by
radiation breeding. It and its offspring quickly replaced the old
bean.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Rutger, then in Davis, Calif., fired gamma
rays at rice. He and his colleagues found a semi-dwarf mutant that
gave much higher yields, partly because it produced more grain. Its
short size also meant it fell over less often, reducing spoilage.
Known as Calrose 76, it was released publicly in 1976.
Today, Dr. Rutger said, about half the rice grown in California
derives from this dwarf. Now retired in Woodland, Calif., he lives
just a few miles from where the descendants grow, he said.
A similar story unfolded in Texas. In 1929, farmers stumbled on the
Ruby Red grapefruit, a natural mutant. Its flesh eventually faded
to pink, however, and scientists fired radiation to produce mutants
of deeper color — Star Ruby, released in 1971, and Rio Red,
released in 1985. The mutant offspring now account for about 75
percent of all grapefruit grown in Texas.
Though the innovations began in the United States, the method is
now used mostly overseas, with Asia and Europe the leading regions.
Experts cited two main reasons: domestic plant researchers over the
decades have already made many, perhaps most of the easiest
improvements that can be achieved with radiation, and they now
focus on highly popular fields like gene splicing.
“Most scientists here would say it’s pretty primitive,” Norman T.
Uphoff, a professor of government and international agriculture at
Cornell University, said of the method. “It’s like being in a huge
room with a flashlight.”
But the flashlight is cheap, which has aided its international spread.
Today, the process usually begins with cobalt-60, a highly
radioactive material used in industrial radiography and medical
radiotherapy. Its gamma rays, more energetic than X-rays, can
travel many yards through the air and penetrate lead.
Understandably, the exposure facilities for radiation breeding have
layers of shielding. Scientists run small machines the size of
water heaters that zap containers full of seeds, greenhouses that
expose young plants and special fields that radiate row upon row of
mature plants. In Japan, one circular field is more than 650 feet
wide. A shielding dike some 28 feet high rises around its perimeter.
Dr. Lagoda said a rust fungus threatened the Japanese pear, a cross
between pears and apples. But one irradiated tree had a branch that
showed resistance. He said the Japanese cloned it, successfully
started a new crop and with the financial rewards “paid for 30
years of research.”
The payoff was even bigger in Europe, where scientists fired gamma
rays at barley to produce Golden Promise, a mutant variety with
high yields and improved malting. After its debut in 1967, brewers
in Ireland and Britain made it into premium beer and whiskey. It
still finds wide use.
“The secret,” reads a recent advertisement for a single malt Scotch
whiskey costing $49.99 a bottle, is “the continued use of finest
Golden Promise barley and the insistence on oak sherry casks from
Spain.”
The atomic agency in Vienna has promoted the method since 1964 in
outreach programs with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, in Rome.
Starting roughly a decade ago, for instance, the atomic agency
helped scientists fight a virus that was killing cocoa trees in
Ghana, which produces about 15 percent of the world’s chocolate.
The virus was killing and crippling millions of trees.
In the city of Accra on the Atlantic coast, at the laboratories of
the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, the scientists exposed cocoa
plant buds to gamma rays. The mutants included one that endowed its
offspring with better resistance to the killer virus.
The scientists planted the resistant variety on 25 farms across
Ghana “with no evidence of a resurgence,” M. R. Appaih, executive
director of the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana, told the agency.
The atomic agency had similar success in the Peruvian Andes, where
some three million people live on subsistence farming. The region,
nearly two miles high, has extremely harsh weather. But nine new
varieties of barley improved harvests to the point that farmers had
surplus crops to sell.
In 2006, Prof. Gomes Pando won the Peruvian prize for Good
Government Practices for her work on the radiation mutants.
In Vietnam, the agency has worked closely with local scientists to
improve production of rice, a crop that accounts for nearly 70
percent of the public’s food energy.
One mutant had yields up to four times higher than its parent and
grew well in acidic and saline soils, allowing farmers to use it in
coastal regions, including the Mekong Delta.
Last year, a team of 10 Vietnamese scientists wrote in an agency
journal, Plant Mutation Reports, that the nation had sown the new
varieties across more than one million hectares, or 3,860 square
miles. The new varieties, they added, “have already produced
remarkable economic and social impacts, contributing to poverty
alleviation in some provinces.”
Dr. Lagoda said that radiation breeding, though an old technology,
was undergoing rapid growth. New methods that speed up the
identification of mutants are making radiation breeding even more
popular, he said.
“Now it becomes interesting again,” he said of the method. “It’s
not a panacea. It’s not the solution. But it’s a very efficient
tool that helps us reduce the breeding time.”
Spreading the secret, Dr. Lagoda added as he played with his tiny
dice, “is very gratifying because we really, really help people.”
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