by K. C. Jaehnig, Media & Communication Resources
 

In the battle over the safety of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, scientists at SIUC are hoping to replace some of the sound and fury with down-to-earth facts.

With support from the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research (commonly known as C-FAR), biotechnologist David Lightfoot and nutritionist William Banz head research teams that are testing the properties of genetically modified crops and looking at how these crops with extra genes might affect those who eat them. 

Lightfoot’s team is particularly interested in how genetically modified crops compare with standard hybrids, a principle called "equivalency."

"Europe will be spending $5 million on GMO safety research in the coming year, and one of the things they will be looking at is equivalency," Lightfoot says.

"Because they want to get U.S. corn out of their markets, they will be trying as hard as they can to find that GMO crops are not equivalent. U.S. companies, on the other hand, will be trying just as hard to prove they are. There needs to be someone in the middle."

Concern about the safety of transgenic crops, which had been simmering in Europe for months, boiled over into fervent opposition last summer. Many observers point to a widely publicized study by researchers at Cornell University as the flashpoint. 

The Cornell researchers found that pollen from a strain of corn genetically engineered to kill corn borers also could kill monarch butterfly caterpillars—and that, in the worst-case scenario, caterpillars feeding on milkweed plants as far as 60 yards from a cornfield might be affected. Other researchers have disputed those findings.

"GMOs are some of the most-studied agricultural products ever produced, both in terms of environmental safety and equivalence, but that doesn’t mean every aspect and ramification has been studied," Lightfoot says.

"We figured if the monarch butterfly showed that the ecological impact hasn’t been studied well enough, what about equivalency? We realized that when the equivalency studies had been done, genomic technology—where you can look at all the genes at one time—didn’t exist. Genomics will make more-precise equivalency studies possible."

To test equivalency, Lightfoot and his colleagues plan to compare the function of every gene in three widely used GMO varieties of corn with the function of every gene in standard hybrids taken from numerous locations around the state. They will run gene assays on corn leaves before the ears appear and on ears when they reach the milky stage (milk dents) and again just before they reach maturity.

Lightfoot also will test a fourth variety of transgenic corn, one that he has modified to make better use of nitrogen. Over the decade he has worked on this strain, he has discovered that it also has twice the amino acids and sugars of other corn varieties and withstands drought better, too.

"It wasn’t supposed to do that—it was just supposed to harvest more nitrogen," Lightfoot says. "It’s changed in ways we don’t understand, so a spin-off for me of doing this study is that the genomics will tell me which specific genes are responsible."

After harvest, Lightfoot’s crew will turn the corn over to Banz and his colleagues, who have designed feeding studies involving two generations of rats. The nutritionists will try to determine whether rats that eat food with genetically modified ingredients pick up extra genes and whether additional genes turn up in their babies, even if the offspring themselves don’t eat GMO food.

C-FAR has funded the research for two years. That’s not a long time, Lightfoot concedes, but no one really knows how many years of study are required to make unquestioned safety claims for transgenic crops.

"As a scientific community, we need to evaluate the relative risk and the relative benefits," he says. "Discretion should be taken before rushing new GMO products to the marketplace, but on the other hand, unwarranted blanket regulations that lack scientific sense should be unacceptable."

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