Plant-Based Vaccines – A Great Idea It’s been over 20 years since I introduced students in my plant sciences classes to the idea of using genetically-engineered plants (GMOs) as a source of edible vaccines. Basically, the idea was that some crop plants could be genetically engineered to produce vaccines in…
Spraying RNAi To Silence Target Genes In Crops (And Insect Pests)… Many object to GMO crop plants, at least in part, because they contain foreign genes artificially – and permanently – inserted into the plant’s genome. But what if you could TEMPORARILY modifY plants (and even their insect pests) by…
What This Post Is – and Isn’t – About This post is mainly about some recent examples of how humans are involved in the “artificial selection” of plants. Many have used this term – including Charles Darwin – to describe the selective breeding of plants and animals. (Since this topic…
On the Past, Present & Future of Plant Genetic Engineering Why would anyone want to insert foreign genes into plants? When and where was this technology invented? And how does it work? Who makes money from this technology? If you grow genetically-engineered crops in the field, won’t the foreign genes…
Making Transgenic Plants Without Using Tissue Culture Since the first successful genetic transformation of plants using Agrobacterium in 1983, many methods for transferring foreign genes into plants have been developed, including the so-called “gene guns”. (A good overview is presented in Ref 1 below.) Many, if not most, of these…