Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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ISIS Press Release 11/03/08

MON810 Genome Rearranged Again
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Stability of All Transgenic Lines in Doubt

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

The instability of transgenic lines is not exactly news, but
something too seldom reported, being The Best Kept Secret of
GM Crops [1], and even we in ISIS have missed this item
hidden in the final paragraphs of a technical paper
published in 2003, which found new signs of instability in a
transgenic maize that has been grown commercially since
1995.

Researchers from the Institute of Molecular Biology in
Barcelona, Spain, analysed MON810 maize Certified Reference
Material (CRM) obtained from the European Commission’s
Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM)
and commercialised by Fluka (Buchs, Switzerland); using the
most sophisticated and sensitive polymerase chain reaction
(PCR) methods available [2]. They found that the transgene
insert had rearranged and probably moved, yet again, from
its whereabouts reported a year ago, when MON810 maize,
along with at least 5 other lines were found to have
rearranged, and no longer matched the genetic maps provided
by the companies [3-5] (Transgenic Lines Proven Unstable,
SiS 20; Unstable Transgenic Lines Illegal, SiS 21).

These initial discoveries [3-5] were so serious that on 28
November 2003, I wrote to Dr. William Moens, Head of the
Service of Biosafety and Biotechnology (SBB), Scientific
Institute of Public Health (IPH), which had reported one of
the two different sets of data on transgenic inserts, and I
raised two important issues [6]:


Read the rest of this article here
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MON810GenomeRearranged.php

Or read other articles about GM maize
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GE-maize.php

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This article can be found on the I-SIS website at
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MON810GenomeRearranged.php