Transgenic Plants

Human agriculture depends heavily on continual improvement, and as the world's population keeps growing, agricultural practices must be constantly reassessed for efficiency. People have long tried to improve the quality and productivity of important crop plants through selection and traditional breeding, involving sexual crosses -- a slow, painstaking process that nonetheless gave us today's high-quality wheat, rice, corn and potato. More recently, biotechnological approaches have been applied to these same plants to create genetic variation faster and more precisely.

The first transgenic plant ever produced was tobacco. Since then, more than 60 transgenic dicot species and several transgenic monocots (maize, oat, rice, wheat) have been developed, along with transgenic tomato, soybean, potato, sugar beet, grapes, brinjal and cotton. Transgenic plants are increasingly used as bioreactors for molecular farming -- producing novel drugs such as interferons, edible vaccines, antibodies, amino acids and immunotherapeutic drugs. Other notable examples described include: a tobacco-produced 'superglue', built from the genes marine mussels use to stick to rocks, valued as a biochemical glue for surgical body repairs; transgenic plants carrying an oil-encoding gene from marine algae, producing oil with nutritional value similar to cod-liver oil; a plant engineered to produce the ant …