Is it true that the use of GMO products can change your genetic code?

Many people are seriously concerned that eating genetically modified products can change their DNA, and therefore they are looking for “no GMOs” products in supermarkets. We decided to check if their fears are justified.

A similar issue is regularly set Users on the Internet, about potential harm to GMOs broadcast bloggers and individual media. Operating these fears, some unscrupulous manufacturers of not only products, but also cosmetic funds and even condoms Place the inscription "without GMOs" on their products and, due to this, increase prices for it. According to hundreds of polls, people are really Ready overpay for such products, while on question “Ordinary plants: potatoes, tomatoes, etc. - do not contain genes, and genetically modified plants contain” only 29% in 2009 correctly answered, in 2018 this percentage rose to 42.

The first genetically modified (GM) product Created In 1972, Paul Berg based on Stanford University, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1980. In 1983 at the Institute of Plant Handword in Cologne Brought off GM-Tabak, resistant to pests, and in 1988 the first GM Kukuruz was planted.

General modification technology Consistent In the fact that in the body (in the described cases of plants) the gene of another organism is “planted”, forcing the first to behave in a special, programmed scientists - for example, actively bear fruit, give more milk or grow faster. Before the heyday of gene technologies, a person selected and crossed the species that have the right sign to fix it in a population, this process is called selection And applies today. Also, in the framework of the selection, hybridization can be carried out: a couple of species is selected, each of which has a useful property, and by crossing scientists receive offspring with both. However, selection and hybridization have their restrictions. When breeding, you can cultivate and consolidate only the property already available in the population, and you can create a hybrid only from related organisms (for example, a hybrid of a mare and a donkey - a mule). Also, during some crossings, male individuals are barren - for example, hybrids are not capable of propagation Lviv and Tigers: ligers and tiglons.

Another problem of selection - along with the desired sign, undesirable and undesirable, which call into question the expediency of further continuation of the genus of these individuals. That is why Scottish Vysloguykh Kotov permissible Knit only with straight-up cats and vice versa, since the inheritance of the vysloquorage gene is associated with an unreasonably high risk of inheritance of diseases of the musculoskeletal system. In addition, selection is usually not a process. It is necessary to carry out selection for several generations, and if plants can take several years from plants, then dozens may require animals. Here, genetic engineering comes to the rescue of a person, which allows how to supplement the genetic code of one species with the property of another (Creation Dry -resistant wheat through the introduction of Gene Scorpio), and conduct a change in everything within the same generation.

Moreover, even without genetic engineering, every living organism (including a person) is, in fact, a mutant, since we are all slightly different from our ancestors. Moreover, in the human body already discovered 145 genes inherited by him from other types: bacteria, eukaryotes, viruses.

Mutations are hereditary, that is, that happened when transmitting genetic material from the father or mother, and acquired. Acquired Included Recombination and mutations caused by various adverse environmental factors - mutagenes. Mutagenes There are Three types: chemical, physical and biological. The chemicals include a wide range of substances - some alkaloids, pesticides, nitrates and others. Physical include the effects of x-ray, electromagnetic and gamma radiation, as well as radioactive decay. Biological represented by the influence of some viruses - measles, rubella, influenza, antigens of microorganisms, transposons DNA and some metabolic products. In principle, only having dealt with the types of mutagenes, we can conclude that GMOs cannot change DNA: they do not contain the listed chemicals, do not radiate either ultraviolet radiation, or x-ray, nor gamma rays, and also do not have the listed viral particles in their composition. 

However, we will figure out how the DNA of the food we consume with our genetic code generally interacts. DNA is a molecule consisting of nucleotides, encoding information about our body. Farm meat and game have its DNA, vegetables from large farms and berry, torn in the middle of the taiga. By calculations Scientists, plant and animal cells contain about 30,000 genes. During heat treatment, most of them are destroyed, but even the vegetables eaten by raw cannot give us their DNA and make us a little vegetable. Those DNA and proteins that enter our body almost completely split In the process of digestion with the help of enzymes, turning into the organic molecules familiar to us. However, how found out Scientists, part of the genetic material of food (not necessarily genetically modified)-not a whole DNA, but several hundred pairs of foundations-can remain in the body and even help it. So, microrm of the type MIR168A, contained in rice associated with the transportation of cholesterol and its splitting in the liver, contributes to protection A person from atherosclerosis. WHO confirms: the consumption of GM-dogs is absolutely harmless to a person, not Fixed Not a single effect of the effect.

At the same time, genetic therapy has a huge potential in the treatment of diseases previously considered incurable. The necessary gene is introduced by a person, replacing it with faulty. On this principle Built Zolgensma, healing spinal muscle atrophy, the drug from hemophilia, transgenic leatherhelping patients with bullous epidermolysis, as well as several drugs-development from different types of cancer. That is, genetically modified people already exist among us.

Thus, the statement that “we are what we eat” is true only in the metaphorical sense. Having tasted the genetically modified on resistance to frosts of potatoes, we will not become more frost-resistant, nor even more so we mutate in potatoes. GM-Den contains several altered or additional DNA sequences, which, using digestive enzymes in our stomach, turn into ordinary nutrients.

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Is it possible to create genetically modified children?
2. Death from GMOs: as Russian media on the old fake came across