The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Where now for GM crops?
In 1966 my father first grew a spring barley called Golden Promise. Golden Promise is a gamma ray mutation of a conventional variety called Maythorpe and is an early example of genetic engineering – but way back in 1966 there was no such definition.
Golden Promise set the bar high and moved farm yields up 50% from five to just more than seven tonnes to the hectare, and I still grow Golden Promise today in my trials field alongside Concerto and Laureate. So where now for GM crops? Professor Wendy Harwood leads the crop transformation group that delivers genetic modification and genome editing at the John Innes Centre, and she addressed the Scottish Society for Crop Research in Dundee two years ago.
Climate change and how to feed the growing global population is driving her research as well as the need to reduce our reliance on artificial fertilisers and pesticides.
Drought is one of the biggest constraints to increasing crop production. It takes between 2,000 and 3,000 litres of water to produce the food we eat in a typical day.
Professor Harwood and her team have used genes from Golden Promise associated with drought tolerance to create GM drought-tolerant plants. When these GM barley plants were grown in northern Jordan, with a 200mm annual rainfall, yield increased by 400%.
What is exciting scientists all over the world is gene editing, or ‘cut and paste’ genetics which gives real hope of eliminating devastating diseases such as potato blight, the disease which destroyed the Irish potato crop in 1845.
Gene editing could be used to cut blight-resistant genes from a wild potato plant and paste these genes into one of our favourite spuds. Many fungal diseases cannot infect a plant without the assistance of a ‘helper gene’ to let it in.
Will Brexit hinder scientists coming here to work? I do not believe so. Organisations such as the John Innes Centre, along with the Sainsbury Lab, are at the cutting edge of plant genetics, and the Bill and Miranda Gates Foundation has invested here with the aim of breeding wheat that can utilise free nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Wherever in the world there are institutes, renowned for cutting-edge biotechnology, then they will always attract the very best people to come to the UK.
We just need to ensure that in Scotland the Government understands that if the James Hutton Institute in Dundee wishes to play its part, then the ban on carrying out field trials of GM plants in Scotland must be revoked.