Biotechnology: Giving Nature a Helping Hand
Joanne Chory was innocently studying microbiology when science made a celebrity of a delicate little weed, causing her interest in plants to bloom. The weed was Arabidopsis thaliana and it was the first plant to have bits of its DNA, and eventually its entire genome, sequenced. But the real breakthrough occurred when scientists successfully introduced genes from other organisms into the weed's cells. It is called plant transformation and it, literally, transformed Chory's research career—offering endless opportunities of exploration. "I wanted to understand complex biological systems, and I got in on the ground floor of plant biotechnology at the dawn of the molecular age," she says.
Twenty years and a revolution in biology later, Joanne, now a plant molecular biologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California, continues to explore one fundamental question—how do plants respond to changing environmental conditions. "Plants, unlike animals, can't walk into a building to get out of the cold—yet the same plant can respond differently depending on where it is stuck in the ground," she says.
Joanne made a pivotal discovery while examining the genes of Arabidopsis. She found—to the surprise of many—that plants actually make hormones, similar to the male or female sex hormones found in humans, that regulate the plant's size. "No one thought plants had the same sort of systems as humans to beef themselves up," Joanne says. The discovery was exciting because it offered a potential way to make plants larger and more fruitful. "I didn't sleep the night after we got our results," she says.
Joanne's work—which combines genetics and biochemical techniques—highlights how biotechnology spans disciplines and at the same time shrinks the divisions between them. Increasingly, her research has a more practical purpose—determining how plants might better tolerate and adapt to the stresses associated with climate change.
The pressures on the planet are increasing dramatically. By 2050, there may not be enough food to feed a population of 9 billion people because there will be less arable land and not enough fresh water for irrigation. Scientists are working hard to find ways to not only increase crop yields, but to do so with less impact on the environment—pressures that are fueling new opportunities to "green" agriculture.
For Joanne, the environmental pressures become personal. "My work is increasingly motivated by the concerns over what kind of world we are leaving our children and grandchildren," she says. Not surprisingly, Joanne is one of many L'Oréal-UNESCO Award winners turning to plant biotechnology to—sustainably—produce more food.
Regional Roots
More recently, UNESCO-L'Oréal fellows from Africa, such as Marietta Solange Soupi Nkeutcha of Cameroon and Nani Drame of Senegal, have turned to biotechnology to improve agricultural yields in their own regions. In Marietta's case, her work will directly improve her family's cocoa plantation—not to mention the world's supply of chocolate. Cocoa seeds are used to make chocolates as well as cocoa butter. But cocoa growers in some tropical African countries, such as Ghana and Cameroon, have struggled with low yields in recent years—due to low soil fertility and plant disease.
The UNESCO-L'Oréal fellowship funded Marietta's Ph.D. research to use biotechnological tools to get more high-yielding plants into farmer's hands. Working at the University of Limoges in France, Marietta is developing a way to harvest embryos from plant tissue, such as flower buds, and grow them in glass Petri dishes in her laboratory. As a result, she can quickly turn a small amount of plant tissue into a large number of identical plants ready for planting.
Nani Drame has a similar drive to improve her region's farming capacity. After finishing her Ph.D. studying plant tolerance to drought at University of Paris XII in France, Nani contacted the African Rice Center in Benin, a pan-African research organization devoted to improving food security in Africa. Nani wanted to apply her skills in molecular biology to help make African crops more tolerant to drought. The African Rice Center had no funding to hire her at that moment, but encouraged her to apply for the UNESCO-L'Oréal fellowship—which she won, and immediately began working to combine the drought tolerance of African rice with the high yield potential of Asian rice. She made progress identifying potential sources of drought tolerance genes and assessing the genetic diversity of African varieties before an even more dire problem—how to improve plant yields in toxic, iron-rich soils—caught her attention.
The reddish water that flows from flooded rice fields is an all too common sign of the toxic levels of iron in the soil that plagues the lowlands of West Africa. Most farmers, Nani says, abandon these fields when yields decline due to the high iron content. Nani is using biotechnology to identify which genes control a plant's response to iron toxicity and then using that information to breed new varieties that are more tolerant of iron. "With agricultural research, we can improve a country's health and wealth at the same time," says Nani.
Tackling Controversy
Before Marietta or Nani had even begun their work, Jennifer Thomson, a plant geneticist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, was already blazing a genetic engineering trail to improve crop yields. "I'm a passionate African, and I realized that people just simply don't have enough to eat," she says of her motivation. She set her sights on South Africa's biggest viral scourge—the maize streak virus, the crop's number one killer. It took almost a decade, but her efforts paid off. In 2007, she introduced the first transgenic maize variety resistant to the maize streak virus.
As biotechnology breakthroughs increased, so did the controversy generated by the techniques. Jennifer experienced both the ups and the downs. Genetic engineering, particularly transgenics—techniques used to take genes from one species to another—is widely considered a safe method to produce pharmaceutical drugs or new crop varieties. But its use has prompted concerns that the resulting transgenic organisms may have unintended effects on the environment. For example, transgenic crops could become weeds in the wild or introduce new allergens into the food supply.
Jennifer hopes that anti-genetic engineering sentiments, which have slowed other scientists' research at times by, for example, delaying government approval of field trials, won't impact her future endeavors. The L'Oréal-UNESCO Award laureate has used her notoriety to debate the scientific merits of the techniques. It may take time, but Jennifer says a rational assessment of the science will validate genetic engineering's potential. Her advice for young researchers is simple: Don't pretend genetic engineering is a magic bullet. It isn't. But it can solve certain immediate problems.
With the growing number of climate change-induced agricultural problems, biotechnology can be used to address many such issues, including the need for more drought-tolerant crops. Jennifer's students have found genes that reduce water loss in a so-called resurrection plant, a mountain-top flowering species able to withstand extended periods of drought and rehydrate completely in a fresh rain. They are now investigating how to introduce these genes into maize varieties hard-hit by drought stress. "It's been so exciting to see the next generation of researchers take the technology and fly with it," she says.
Half a world away, another UNESCO-L'Oréal fellow, Analilia Arroyo Becerra, a plant geneticist at the Research Center of Applied Biotechnology in Tlaxcala, Mexico, is also exploring the genetics of recently discovered Mexican varieties of resurrection plants in the hopes of one day improving maize's drought tolerance. Working with her husband and research partner, Analilia is beginning the first molecular studies of them; looking for any master genes that enable these plant cells to survive drought and other stresses.
Anti-genetic engineering sentiments have been strong in Mexico, where the domestication of maize began roughly 10,000 years ago. The government has, until recently, maintained a strict policy banning transgenic crops for fear they would contaminate the thousands of local maize varieties. Analilia says the controversy over transgenics inadvertently drew her to the field because she wanted to understand how plants' natural processes differed from biotechnology-enhanced ones. She realized that transgenic techniques may in fact be a safer way to improve crops than the more accepted method of creating hybrids. "Hybrids are a mix of the thousands and thousands of genes from the different complete genomes of two plants, but with biotechnology we can put just one gene into a different species and carefully analyze how those plants perform," she says. It is with great care that Analilia hopes to improve the production of crops in her country.
These researchers all demonstrate that biotechnology can improve the world's dwindling food supplies. They do so by sharing one passion in common—a deep and abiding desire to help feed the world, sustainably. "When scientists explore research they are passionate about, they do their best work and create even more exciting opportunities," says Jennifer.
What is Biotechnology?
Biotechnology describes the intersection of biology and technology. Throughout history, humans have changed living creatures to suit their purposes; for example, by domesticating animals or cultivating plants. Biotechnology uses a modern set of molecular tools that allow scientists to change an organism's DNA to produce, for example, new crops or medicines. This process of "genetic engineering" has allowed researchers to transfer specific pieces of DNA between different organisms in order to produce new products or abilities.
Download a PDF of this page.
