Johann Schernthaner’s phone was ringing off the hook last week.
The soft-spoken Agriculture Canada scientist sounded bewildered by all the fuss generated by his latest research paper, which triggered dozens of phone calls from reporters across North American and Europe.
“It seems like certain buzz words are flagged and create a lot of interest,” he said in an interview from his office at the department’s cereals and oilseeds research centre in Ottawa.
Buzz words such as transgenic, outcrossing, novel traits and pollen flow, showed up in a research paper by Schernthaner and four Ag Canada colleagues published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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In it, the researchers describe a new method of preventing plants from spreading their unwanted genes to plants in neighbouring fields.
It involves what is called a “seed lethal system” that prevents any pollen that moves to a foreign plant from producing fertile seed.
Two new genes would be inserted into the plant. One is the seed lethal gene, which prompts seeds to produce a hormone that prevents germination. The other is the repressor gene, which prevents the first gene from working, thus allowing germination to take place.
As long as both genes are present, the plant is viable and can reproduce normally. But if the plant’s pollen drifts to a foreign plant that doesn’t have the repressor gene, the lethal gene will kick in and prevent the production of fertile seed.
“The use of this system under typical agricultural conditions, where seed is harvested and new varieties are sown and crops are rotated, may prohibit the establishment of novel traits in unintended populations,” according to the research paper.
The system has been successfully tested on tobacco and canola plants in laboratory and greenhouse settings. No field research has taken place.
The new system would be big news for farmers and consumers concerned about the potential for pollen from genetically modified crops to drift to other fields and pass genes to other plants.
“If you have methods you can introduce into plants to control pollination, you definitely alleviate concerns around the whole issue of contamination,” said Wilf Keller, a researcher with the National Research Council’s plant biotechnology institute.
However, the future of the research is up in the air. The next logical step would be to test the concept with other species of plants in greenhouses.
But the industry partner that had been helping finance the research along with Agriculture Canada has dropped out of the project.
“We’ve really reached a decision point,” said John Dueck, science director for genomics and bio-information with Agriculture Canada. “We’re going to have to decide where to go from here.”
Even if the research continued and everything went well, it would be five to eight years before the system is commercially available.
