BIOTECHNOLOGY AND TRANSGENIC

 

Historically, biotechnology controlled manner has been the ideal tool for healthier foods and optimal nutritional values.

 

For example, the use of yeasts after Neolithic to accelerate the fermentation process, was a revolution that the production of bread, wine or beer was increased to meet the demands of food consumption in a growing population and, paradoxically, much more susceptible to the transmission of viral and bacterial diseases in step hunter-gatherers.

 

In addition, agricultural biotechnology techniques have recently enabled, obtain vital products such as antibiotics, amino acids or vitamin boost production in many foods.

 

Today, modern biotechnology has incorporated the advances in genetic engineering to modify the genetic material of a living organism, improving their organoleptic characteristics production or consumption. Specifically in agriculture, is used to achieve better adapted to certain climates, increase resistance to pests and diseases, allowing lower water consumption or increase the nutritional characteristics of the products.

 

But let us return for a moment to our Neolithic past. For about 15,000 years humans have changed, utterly ignoring the why, its surroundings and especially consumer food products. An example: the wild wheat of low productivity, it can be consumed only after a laborious grinding treatment that did not guarantee their digestive acceptance by many people suffering mild intolerance or allergies. Only after several generations of optimization and improvement of crop seeds, grain wheat current practice allows consumption overall tolerance with optimum productivity.

 

Because farmers have manipulated the genetic structure of plants and animals since agriculture began, controlling the process of domestication through numerous cycles of natural selection of the best adapted individuals. This exploitation of diversity in biological organisms has provided better crops, planting trees, new cross-species, and even farm animals or more productive than their original ancestors fish species.

 

Not because, as we see, biotechnology, new process, although in recent years it has come to the fore of the tendentious information, in order only to mislead the public and consumers, to the point of considering the word "transgenic" as taboo. Let us therefore what this term applied to the food industry.

 

Since the 70s, the World Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sponsors research on mutation induction to enhance genetic improvement of food and industrial crops in order to obtain new improved varieties. Induced mutation to assist breeding has resulted in the introduction of new varieties of crops such as rice, wheat, barley, apples, citrus, sugar cane and banana (the database Mutant Varieties FAO / IAEA contains more than 2300 varieties officially released). The application of mutation induced to crop breeding has had tremendous economic impact on agriculture and food production.

 

The problem arises from the XXI century with new discoveries and interpretations of genetic DNA strands that have reactivated the biotech industry, improving and incorporating new techniques more sophisticated mutation. An example is reverse genetics, by artificially extends the life of a product of food consumption, or disposition of high productivity seeds but impossible flowering and crossing for a second generation.

 

GM foods are therefore those that have been produced from a genetically engineered organism and is incorporated genes from another organism to produce new desired characteristics. As noted, nothing in principle punishable in both respects the classical procedure we have seen in traditional agricultural processes improved by directed crossings.

 

However, inclusion in the process of recombinant DNA technology, by which DNA sequences are manipulated directly (thus allowing the extraction of a biological taxon and their inclusion in another, as well as the modification or elimination of these genes to produce new GM or GMO modified species) is the one that could lead to questions that, in any case, would always be based on mere speculation ethically incompatible order regulations regarding food whose primary purpose is the effective protection of consumers.

 

It is curious that in the XXI century with the difficulties of an industry that has always tried to meet the needs and food demands of a growing world population, scientific advances that provide significant improvements in productivity and food quality, are challenged to the point of gagging research and preclude innovation processes in agrifood companies.

 

Obviously the alarmism caused to these processes beyond a comprehensible ethical questions, which can always be corrected through rigorous use of solvents information sources they consider all parameters used in biotechnological techniques with regulations and regulations in the sector .

 

 

 

+ Info:

•  National Center for Biotechnology: http://www.cnb.csic.es/index.php/es/
•  The 10 main concerns of consumers to food biotechnology: http://gmoanswers.com/studies/top-10-consumer-questions
•  Control in Food Biotechnology: http://www.consumer.es/seguridad-alimentaria/normativa-legal/2007/10/29/171192.php