Onko tässä kyse kokonaan uudentyyppisestä geenitekniikasta:
Harvesting wild genes gives crops renewed resistance to diseaseA global alliance of researchers has pioneered a new method to rapidly recruit disease-resistance genes from wild plants for transfer into domestic crops. The technique promises to revolutionise the development of disease-resistant varieties for the global food supply.
The technique called AgRenSeq was developed by scientists at the John Innes Centre in Britain working with colleagues in Australia and the US. It was published today in Nature Biotechnology.
Joka tapauksessa siis villeistä kasveista saadaan siirrettyä geeneinä (geenin klooneina?) vastustuskykyä taudeille, ja suhteellisen nopealla aikataululla. Ja myös suhteellisen (tai oikeastaan hyvin) halpaan hintaan:
Dr Brande Wulff, a crop genetics project leader at the John Innes Centre and a lead author of the study, said: "We have found a way to scan the genome of a wild relative of a crop plant and pick out the resistance genes we need: and we can do it in record time. This used to be a process that took 10 or 15 years and was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
"We have perfected the method so that we can clone these genes in a matter of months and for just thousands of dollars instead of millions."
Olisiko tässä kyseessä se vehnän ruostetauti, josta Norman Borlaug elämänsä viimeisinä vuosina oli huolestunut:
The research reveals that AgRenSeq has been successfully trialled in a wild relative of wheat -- with researchers identifying and cloning four resistance genes for the devastating stem rust pathogen in the space of months. This process would easily take a decade using conventional means.
Painetaan nyt tuo nimi "AgRenSeq" mieleen ainakin siksi ajaksi, kun sille menetelmälle ei keksitä virallista yleisnimeä.