Breakthrough: Food for the 21st century

Imagine a banana loaded with a vaccine for hepatitis B. Or rice enriched with vitamin A. Perhaps, mangoes that ripen in two months, or maybe corn that is resistant to insects without needing insecticides. Farfetched? Not really.

Biotechnology has made man’s musings a century ago a reality today.

Modern biotechnology is any biology-based technology that uses organisms or heir parents to make or modify products or improve plants, animals and microorganisms. It applies scientific advances as plant tissue and cell culture, genetic engineering or gene transfer to modify gene fragments of the same, related, or unrelated species to produce new traits in an organism.

In the Philippines, scientists at the Institute of Plant Breeding (IPB) at the University of the Philippines Los Baños have long been doing researches on some of the country’s major crops for export to improve the plants’ breed and enhance their breeding procedures. These crops include mango, banana, papaya, abaca and coconut.

Dr. Evelyn Mae Tecson Mendoza, IPB program leader, said the researches are aimed at increasing the crops’ yield ceilings, making them more resistant to pests and diseases and enhancing the crop‘s nutritional, processing and storage qualities, using tissue and cell culture, market technologies and transgenics or genetic engineering.

Tissue and cell culture techniques are used for micropropagation, in vitro gene banking, disease-elimination and genetic engineering process, among others.

IPB is also into marker technologies or diagnostics. Using DNA or proteins, this technology is used to tag important traits to improve the selection efficiency in plant breeding by marker assisted selection (MAS); identify markers and develop diagnostics for varietal/pathogen/pest identification; and determine genetic diversity of plants, pathogens and pests.

The third area that IPB focuses on is transgenics or genetic engineering, which allows the specific transfer of important genes.

Through marker technologies, IPB was able to identify protein markers for varieties of rambutan through a technique using protein isozymes on the young seedling stage of the plants.

"May supsupin at tuklapin varieties. Some people like tuklapin more than supsupin, so there is a premium for the tuklapin seedling. The technique allows us to accredit nurseries and to say definitively that this is tuklapin or this is supsupin using these markers," Mendoza said.

Using the marker technology, IPB was also able to differentiate the cultivas of coconut seed nuts.

"The advantage of identifying the coconut seed nut is that the farmer would be able to determine the type of coconut he wants. Since coconut seeds are also costly, this would save the planter money, time and effort," Mendoza said.

IPB was also able to develop an immunological test kit that screens the presence of the ratoon-stunting disease of sugarcane.

"Even before the seed pieces of sugar cane are planted, they can already determine if it’s diseased or free from disease. That saves the sugar planter a lot of effort," Mendoza said.

These researchers, however, are yet to be field-yielded.

Using genetic engineering, IPB is now developing a variety of papaya and mango with delayed ripening trait, papaya with papaya ring spot virus resistance, banana with resistance to bunchy top virus, coconut with modified fatty acid composition and corn with resistance to corn borer.

Mendoza explained that IPB’s initial projects were to develop papayas and mangoes with delayed ripening trait so as to prolong their shelf life, "to export papaya and mango to more distant places." This trait would also lessen food wastage.

Coconut, one of the country‘s major exports, is likewise being enhanced. A coconut variety that can produce more C12 or lauric acid, a component of the oil. This is used for many purposes, among them, as ingredients for detergents, shampoo and soap.

"Lauric acid now has a competitor, the transgenically-derived canola oil, lauricole," Mendoza said.

While studies have shown GM crops have contributed to reduced usage of pesticides, reduced soil erosion, higher and more stable yields and better quality crops, the issue over the safety of GM crops for human intake and for the environment persists. Mendoza however, allayed such fears.

"Before a GM crop becomes commercially available, it goes through a series of testing. It is heavily regulated from R&D to commercialization. Safety aspects are addressed in the laboratory: the safety aspects in and outside the laboratory are taken care of. All GM crops like Bt com, herbicide-tolerant soybean, herbicide-tolerant corn, herbicide-tolerant potato, these all went through every rigid regulation for biosafety to environment and safety to man," Mendoza said.

The IPB program leader said the potentials of plant biotechnology in the Philippines can be further explored with the help of the private sector, especially the food industry.

Mendoza is one of the presentors at the Mindlink II: Industry-Academe Conference on Biotechnology, on Sept. 7, at the APEC Center at UP Los Baños. For particulars, visit the conference website at http://www.upd.edu.ph/biotech.