Potential healing power of GE potato

Scientists have genetically modified a potato to produce a protein that helps the body to repair itself after surgery. A team from Singapore Polytechnic and New Zealand's Crop and Food Research says the protein is so valuable that the potatoes could be grown only in containment - avoiding worries about genes "escaping" into the environment.

Crop and Food scientist Tony Conner said in April that each gram of the protein, extracted from about seven potato plants, was worth about $1 million.

"We can make a synthetic gene and transfer it into potatoes, and the potatoes produce the protein," he said this week.

"We have been able to extract it and purify it. The issue is whether there is sufficient protein to scale it up and go to the next level."

The protein helps the body repair itself after heart or circulatory system surgery or nervous diseases.

The idea of making it in potatoes dates from the early 1990s, when Singaporean student Oi Wah Liew did her doctorate at Lincoln University near Christchurch, where Conner is a part-time professor.

Liew is now a lecturer at Singapore Polytechnic, but returns to Lincoln once a year to work on the potato project. In 1999 she told a German news agency that she took the gene from a rat and used it in potatoes to make a hormone called atrial natriuretic factor, which occurs in the hearts of humans and other mammals. At present, the only source of the substance for medical use is from dead human bodies.

Conner said that now that the technology was proven in potatoes, he and Liew might try to duplicate it in a non-food crop such as tobacco in order to reduce public concerns about tampering with a staple food.

The institute is developing other plants with health properties such as boosting selenium, a trace element in soils which helps people to stave off heart disease and HIV/Aids. It is deficient in many soils in New Zealand, China and elsewhere.

"We are trying to understand the nature of selenium accumulation and uptake in plants and whether we can improve that by management or classical breeding or whether it might be a GM approach," Conner said.

"We are trying to use genes from some of the brassicas because they are known to be accumulators."