Genetically Modified Wheat for Celiac/MC

[Camryn'sMommy]

Hey everyone - I'm not sure if you have seen this yet, but I thought it was really interesting.

PS - Camryn is doing great as long as she doesn't get any gluten, citrus or chocolate. Her Dr. said she doesn't have to come back for 9 months because she gained 5 lbs and grew 3 inches :)

GMO wheat acceptance hinges on public benefit
Sun Jun 7, 2009 6:46am EDT
By Rod Nickel (Source - www.reuters.com)

SASKATOON, Saskatchewan (Reuters) - Winning over wary consumers in Europe and elsewhere to genetically modified wheat hinges on scientists finding a direct benefit to the public, not just to farmers or seed companies, experts in wheat breeding and genetics said.

Europeans, considered among the staunchest opponents of food created with genetically modified organisms (GMO), are at least a decade from accepting biotech food, said Meinolf Lindhauer from Germany's Max Rubner federal research institute of nutrition and food.

"The majority of consumers in many European countries, not in all, do not accept GMO at all," he said while attending the International Wheat Quality conference in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The only way for GMO wheat proponents to be heard above the arguments of anti-GMO groups is to demonstrate biotechnology could give consumers a "convincing advantage," he said.

One way might be modifying wheat so it could be eaten by people with celiac disease, a serious digestive condition caused by eating the protein gluten, he said.

In the long run, genetically modified wheat will be necessary to keep pace with corn and soybeans, said Robert Henry, director of the Center for Plant Conservation Genetics in Lismore, Australia.

"In terms of the profitability for farmers to grow wheat versus maize, wheat has been left behind," he said. "My concern is that wheat is a very important food crop and at some point we need to correct that and produce more wheat."

Consumers support genetic modification to improve health, such as the production of drugs, but resistance is fixed on GMO food, Henry said.

"If the consumer perceives that the benefit is just for the producer or worse still, just for some big company that's making a profit out of it, why would they want to adopt it? They really need to be convinced there's some benefit for the environment from a point of view of their own health."

The sustainability of agriculture, considering growing per capita food consumption and limited arable land, will be central to the GMO wheat debate, Henry said.

The Canadian Wheat Board, one of the world's largest wheat marketers, has said it won't support GMO wheat unless it gains acceptance among world markets such as Europe and Japan.

Farm groups in the top wheat-exporting countries of Canada, the United States and Australia jointly called last month for commercial development of GMO wheat. Other farm and environment groups issued an opposing statement.

In 2004, Monsanto Co withdrew its application for a herbicide-resistant GMO wheat in the face of protest from U.S. wheat buyers and marketers such as the Canadian Wheat Board.

European consumers, especially those in Germany, Austria and France, are more likely to believe anti-GMO activist groups than scientists, Lindhauer said. Consumers and farmers in Australia are more open to genetically modified wheat than Europeans, but more wary than North Americans, Henry said.

In India, one of the developing countries driving higher food demand, farmers would support a GMO wheat modified to resist disease, said Harcharan Singh Dhaliwal of the Indian Institute of Technology in Uttarakhand, India. But Dhaliwal said consumers are harder to convince. "(GMO wheat) would be the last choice," he said.

The public doesn't understand how fine the line is between widely accepted plant-breeding techniques and genetic modification, Henry said. GMO refers to DNA tinkering that scientists perform outside the cell, before putting the modified DNA back inside, he said. Rearranging DNA within the cell describes traditional plant-breeding, he said.

[tex]

It's great to see that Camryn is still doing so well.

We've discussed this wheat project a time or two in the past, but it seems to remain a tough sell. I guess there aren't enough celiacs in the world to get the project put on the fast track. The general population is so opposed to GMO technology, due to all the bad propaganda, that even some celiacs are opposed to that genetic change, because of other concerns.

IOW, unlike our ancestors, who were pioneers out of necessity, people living today, fear the unknown, whether that fear is justified or not. Since Europeans are much further removed from their ancestral pioneers, than the citizens of Australia and the U. S., they are even more opposed to changes such as GMO technology.

Personally, I think it would be the greatest thing to happen to wheat since modern wheat was originally developed by genetic modification, (hybridization), around 9,000 years ago.

Thanks for posting that info.

Tex

[Gloria]

I'm not sure that I understand why modified wheat would be a bonus for gluten-intolerant people. It seems to me that one of the desirable qualities of wheat is the gluten and the other is its low-cost. That's what makes bread so airy and gives it cohesiveness. Everything we complain about in our alternative flours would be present in gluten-free wheat products.

There are certainly more nutritious alternative flours, but they don't have the "staying power" of gluten. Am I missing something here?

I also don't object to genetically modified food. I planted hybrid tomatoes in my garden this year - isn't every hybrid food genetically modified, or am I missing something there, too?

Gloria

[tex]

Everything we complain about in our alternative flours would be present in gluten-free wheat products.

Not necessarily. There are two main groups of proteins in gluten, known as gliadins and glutenins. During digestion, these proteins break down into smaller units, called peptides, (strings of amino acids), and only certain peptides cause the problems for celiacs. The parent proteins have polypeptide chains that include hundreds of amino acids, but the amino acid sequences that cause the problems, are only relatively short chains. (One is comprised of 19 amino acids, for example, and if I recall correctly, another contains 33). Hopefully, by replacing only a few amino acids in critical locations, the sequences can be altered to eliminate the toxic effects on gluten-sensitive digestive systems, while retaining the agglutinating characteristics that make wheat so prized for baking.

The biggest problem that I can see in this whole project, is the fact that as far as I am aware, no one has ever isolated all of the problematic peptides that are contained in the gliadin and glutenin amino acid sequences. Maybe I'm trying to make the problem too difficult, though - maybe there's a way to go about it without even knowing specifically which ones are the problems. You could be correct, of course - it's certainly possible that the amino acid sequences cannot be adequately altered without losing the agglutinating qualities of wheat. If that turns out to be the case, then, as you say, it would be just another GF grain, with poor baking characteristics.

isn't every hybrid food genetically modified, or am I missing something there, too?

You are quite correct - all hybrids have been genetically modified, including plants that we don't even consider to be hybrids. This is true of all grains, because all grains are grasses, and grasses in their original, unmodified state, wouldn't produce enough grain to feed a sparrow. The ancient ancestors of corn, (maize), for example, don't even remotely resemble corn. We wouldn't even recognize them, if we saw them, (well, unless we happened to know what they look like, from the study of archaeological records). The original ancestors of wheat are not quite as unrecognizable, but still very dissimilar to the plant that we know as wheat. Wheat has been genetically modified many, many times, during it's development, by selective breeding. There are two main hybridization events in wheat's history, however. One occurred about 30,000 years ago, probably by accident, to create emmer wheat, and the other occurred about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago, to create what we recognize as modern wheat. Farmers, and seed producers have modified it many times since then, by selective breeding, (IOW, selecting seed from plants that have "desirable" genetic characteristics).

With genetic modification based on selective breeding, though, the genetic changes take place internally. With GMO products, the genetic modifications are made by external means, either by externally combining DNA moledcules from different sources, to create a new set of genes, and then injecting that DNA material into an organism, (known as recombinant DNA technology), or by simply inserting DNA from a different species into an organism, thereby transforming it into a transgenic organism. The end effects are similar, but GMO technology takes much of the guesswork out of the process, and greatly speeds up the "evolutionary" process, of course. This seems to scare people.

Tex