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0:00
Hello.
My name is Wendy Harwood.
I'm a senior scientist at the John
Innes Center, Norwich in the UK.
I'm going to talk to you today
about transgenics in agriculture.
And I'm going to be focusing
specifically on transgenic crops.
0:15
So in my talk today
I'm going to start
off by just giving some definitions.
What do we mean by transgenic
or genetically modified crops?
I'm going to look at a comparison
of traditional plant breeding
to GM technology.
I'm going to look at
the actual technology
that we use to produce GM
crops, and what that means.
Then, look at GM crops worldwide.
And at the end I'm going to
look at what's in the pipeline.
What are the new things
that are coming along
that might be important
for us in the future?
And I'm going to end with looking
at some new technologies that are
referred to as new plant
breeding techniques.
So this, if you like, is
just moving on the next stage
from traditional GM technology.
0:55
So firstly, genetic modification.
So the genetic modification
process produces transgenic plants.
What we mean by genetic modification
is making an alteration in the DNA
of a plant to another
organism to give
it a new and useful characteristic.
So GM technology allows the
introduction and the functional
expression of foreign
genes in plant cells.
I often say GM technology
is all around us.
So GM is being used
in many applications.
So for example, the production of
very common drugs like insulin.
It's commonly used in
the production of cheese.
These are GM processes using
genetically modified microbes.
So normally GM we think about
adding an additional gene.
And it can often mean adding one
additional gene to a plant genome
that already consists of maybe
between 25,000 and 95,000 genes,
so adding one additional gene
to that already huge number.
