STUDY CLAIMS BACTERIUM HAS GENETICALLY ENGINEERED MANY PLANTS

Much of the controversy around genetically modified (GM) plants is that they aren’t “natural”, and somehow dangerous. But we may want to reconsider exactly what “natural” is, Mihai Andrei wrote for ZME Science.

Genetic modification is a process that sometimes happens naturally at the hands of bacteria, a new study published in the journal Plant Molecular Biology concludes. Dozens of plants, including bananas, peanuts, hops, cranberries, and tea were found to contain the Agrobacterium microbe — the exact bacterium that scientists use to create GM crops.

“Horizontal gene transfer from Agrobacterium to dicots is remarkably widespread,” the study reads, reporting that around 1 in 20 plants is naturally transgenic.

Transgenic means that one or more DNA sequences from another species have been introduced by artificial means — in other words, an organism that has been modified genetically. In unicellular prokaryotes, this is a fairly common process, but it is less understood (and less common) in macroscopic, complex organisms.

The ability of Agrobacterium to transfer genes to plants and fungi, however, is well known. Researchers have known it for a while, as they are using this exact type of bacteria to produce desired genetic changes in plants. But before researchers thought of this, the method emerged naturally.

In 2015, an impactful study found that sweet potatoes are naturally transgenic — they’ve been GM’d by Agrobacterium. This came as a surprise for many consumers, but many biologists suspected that sweet potatoes weren’t that unique, and several other plants went through a similar process.

Tatiana Matveeva and Léon Otten studied the genomes of some 356 dicot species and found 15 naturally occurring transgenic species. It’s still a rare occurrence, but 1 in 20 is too much to just chalk it up to a freak accident.

“This particular type of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) could play a role in plant evolution,” the researchers say.

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