Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are bioengineered products developed by significant agricultural industry manufacturers and have been used for decades in the commercial sector. In order to produce crops that are resistant to pesticides and insects and ultimately increase crop output, the organisms were developed. The idea of selective breeding, which has been used for centuries in history, served as an inspiration for GMO. They are employed in the production of food, medicine, and a range of scientific studies (Wunderlish & Gatto 2015). By exploiting and altering the bacterial DNA, the first scientific model of GMO was created in 1974 to address kanamycin resistance in a toad. The later experiments included producing first transgenic mouse and first transgenic plant with the target of improved nutritive value.

While the transgenic animals are designed mostly for scientific research and medicinal experiments, the transgenic plants have achieved a higher score for its success and thus have gained access to reach the commercial market since two decades. Where on the other hand the knowledge of consumers related to GMO crops has not reached to a satisfactory rate. At a worldwide level consumers have provided the unfamiliarity, lesser knowledge, and misunderstanding related to food products, bringing a questionable attitude of consumers for the use of GMOs (Wunderlish & Gatto 2015). Besides consumers many of the individuals working in health care and medical related domains have also showed an unacceptable response towards GMO. They showed their concerns on the scientific methods being used, experiment designs, test subjects, samples size, duration, validation of risk and benefits along with ethical acceptance.

Scientific methods

Scientists approached the selective breeding approach for GMOs to reach an advanced level in health sector by providing the resistance to diseases. The experiments were initially performed on micro-organisms, animals and plants. They used restriction enzyme, ligation, bombarding, electroporation for the transfusion of modified modified DNA into targeted organisms. In the later stages GMO animals are targeted basically for the improvement in medicines, GMO crops are being used to target human population of all groups and ethnicity with the claims of better quality food supporting health benefits. However, the GMO food has not bene fully accepted by the consumers, therefore, the authorities provided a guarantee GMO tractability test using various direct and indirect methods. Direct methods are DNA based, indirect methods are protein based techniques used to detect GMO based food samples. These are scientifically proven efficient and reliable methods. This method also includes mass spectrometry as a tool for GM crop characterization (Fraiture et al. 2015).

Protein based detection method is fast and simple however, has its own disadvantages such as its dependency on the level of targeted protein expression which is highly variable in plants, high degradation and denaturation during food processing due to protein nature. Specification and sensitivity of the essay can be altered due to any modification in targeted protein. Also, the technique is not useful if there are no impact of genetic modifications at protein level. Therefore, to overcome such barriers, DNA based straightforward transgenic integrated sequences (Fraiture et al. 2015) were developed. It included qPCR technique which had its own limitations and to overcome them techniques like capillary gel electrophoresis, microarrays, loop mediated isothermal amplification, sequencing and next generation sequencing techniques were used.

The scientific methods were used for the detection of GMO in crop to provide a labels following the act of consumers right to choose. Therefore, they can have their own understanding and decisions whether they want to consume the GMO product. GMO are still facing the debates of ethical approval and therefore their commercialization might have been allowed however, their use cannot be forced on its consumers even if it has all the ethical clearances.

Risk assessment, management and ethical considerations

The GMOs has been dangling around the cause and conflicts of scientist and ethical committees. There are certain reasons of ethical considerations which hurdles the approval of consistent use of GMO on regular basis. The first issue included the practical constraints of field tests because of small sample size experiments of transgenic plants which constituted an improper practice in risk assessment. Also there is not an available record of enough data supply for the characterization of risk of marketable end product for any crop regime. For example, Bt corn (Rajan &Deborah 2012).

The low available data limits the significant detection of type II errors when it is already present, and thus inappropriate estimation of probability test for risk management in the results. Risk assessment requires independent variables with different range of environment and conditions, involvement of endless testing and risk assessment done case by case with the involvement of extrapolation which apparently is not possible in a small set of study (Rajan &Deborah 2012).

The other issue which raised ethical concerns was the GMO regulated field test without biosafety practice and non-consideration of the complexity of interaction of unregulated surrogates for GMO production. Another issue concern was the low funding for the development of GMO which does not provide a comprehensive data to support a decision.

Conclusion

The issue of conflicts of ethical considerations are purely based on environment and public health thus can be variable. The scope of knowledge is based on the risk assessment familiarity in GMO. The familiarity is derived by experts with knowledge in their field of domain of organism, trait, population, environment with varied understanding over the time, thus, thoughts can be conflicting as well (Rajan &Deborah 2012). The scientist with a knowledge in bioengineering, biotechnology, requirements of organism behavior and environmental conditions evaluate their results on a different prospective of new traits and its further scope.



Works Cited

Fraiture, M.-A., Herman, P., Taverniers, I., De Loose, M., Deforce, D., & Roosens, N. H. (2015). Current and New Approaches in GMO Detection: Challenges and Solutions. BioMed Research International, 2015, 392872. http://doi.org/10.1155/2015/392872

Rajan, S. R., & Letourneau, D. K. (2012). What Risk Assessments of Genetically Modified Organisms Can Learn from Institutional Analyses of Public Health Risks. Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, 2012, 203093. http://doi.org/10.1155/2012/203093

Wunderlich, S., & Gatto, K. A. (2015). Consumer Perception of Genetically Modified Organisms and Sources of Information. Advances in Nutrition, 6(6), 842–851. http://doi.org/10.3945/an.115.008870







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