Genetically modified apples may soon hit the market

Photograph by Travis Rathbone; Stylist: Sarah Guido for Halley Resources

Later this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture may approve the Arctic Granny and Arctic Golden, the first genetically modified apples to hit the market. Although it will probably be another two years before the non-browning fruits appears in stores, at least one producer is already scrambling to label its apples GMO-free.

The looming apple campaign is just the latest salvo in the ongoing war over genetically modified organisms (GMOs)—one that's grown increasingly contentious. Over the past decade, the controversy surrounding GMOs has sparked worldwide riots and the vandalism of crops in Oregon, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines. In May, the governor of Vermont signed a law that will likely make it the first U.S. state to require labels for genetically engineered ingredients; more than 50 nations already mandate them. Vermont State Senator David Zuckerman told Democracy Now!, "As consumers, we are guinea pigs, because we really don't understand the ramifications."

But the truth is, GMOs have been studied intensively, and they look a lot more prosaic than the hype contends. To make Arctic apples, biologists took genes from Granny Smith and Golden Delicious varieties, modified them to suppress the enzyme that causes browning, and reinserted them in the leaf tissue. It's a lot more accurate than traditional methods, which involve breeders hand-pollinating blossoms in hopes of producing fruit with the desired trait. Biologists also introduce genes to make plants pest- and herbicide-resistant; those traits dominate the more than 430 million acres of GMO crops that have already been planted globally. Scientists are working on varieties that survive disease, drought, and flood.

So what, exactly, do consumers have to fear? To find out, Popular Science chose 10 of the most common claims about GMOs and interviewed nearly a dozen scientists. Their collective answer: not much at all.

1) Claim: Genetic engineering is a radical technology.

Humans have been manipulating the genes of crops for millennia by selectively breeding plants with desirable traits. (A perfect example: the thousands of apple varieties.) Virtually all of our food crops have been genetically modified in some way. In that sense, GMOs are not radical at all. But the technique does differ dramatically from traditional plant breeding.

Here's how it works: Scientists extract a bit of DNA from an organism, modify or make copies of it, and incorporate it into the genome of the same species or a second one. They do this by either using bacteria to deliver the new genetic material, or by shooting tiny DNA-coated metal pellets into plant cells with a gene gun. While scientists can't control exactly where the foreign DNA will land, they can repeat the experiment until they get a genome with the right information in the right place.

That process allows for greater precision. "With GMOs, we know the genetic information we are using, we know where it goes in the genome, and we can see if it is near an allergen or a toxin or if it is going to turn [another gene] off," says Peggy G. Lemaux, a plant biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "That is not true when you cross widely different varieties in traditional breeding."

2) Claim: GMOs are too new for us to know if they are dangerous.

It depends on how you define new. Genetically engineered plants first appeared in the lab about 30 years ago and became a commercial product in 1994. Since then, more than 1,700 peer-reviewed safety studies have been published, including five lengthy reports from the National Research Council, that focus on human health and the environment. The scientific consensus is that existing GMOs are no more or less risky than conventional crops.

3) Claim: Farmers can't replant genetically modified seeds.

So-called terminator genes, which can make seeds sterile, never made it out of the patent office in the 1990s. Seed companies do require farmers to sign agreements that prohibit replanting in order to ensure annual sales, but Kent Bradford, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis, says large-scale commercial growers typically don't save seeds anyway. Corn is a hybrid of two lines from the same species, so its seeds won't pass on the right traits to the next generation. Cotton and soy seeds could be saved, but most farmers don't bother. "The quality deteriorates—they get weeds and so on—and it's not a profitable practice," Bradford says.

4) Claim: We don't need GMOs—there are other ways to feed the world.

GMOs alone probably won't solve the planet's food problems. But with climate change and population growth threatening food supplies, genetically modified crops could significantly boost crop output. "GMOs are just one tool to make sure the world is food-secure when we add two billion more people by 2050," says Pedro Sanchez, director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "It's not the only answer, and it is not essential, but it is certainly one good thing in our arsenal."

5) Claim: GMOs cause allergies, cancer, and other health problems.

Many people worry that genetic engineering introduces hazardous proteins, particularly allergens and toxins, into the food chain. It's a reasonable concern: Theoretically, it's possible for a new gene to express a protein that provokes an immune response. That's why biotech companies consult with the Food and Drug Administration about potential GMO foods and perform extensive allergy and toxicity testing. Those tests are voluntary but commonplace; if they're not done, the FDA can block the products.

One frequently cited study, published in 2012 by researchers from the University of Caen in France, claimed that one of Monsanto's corn GMOs caused tumors in lab rats. But the study was widely discredited because of faulty test methods, and the journal retracted it in 2013. More recently, researchers from the University of Perugia in Italy published a review of 1,783 GMO safety tests; 770 examined the health impact on humans or animals. They found no evidence that the foods are dangerous.

6) Claim: All research on GMOs has been funded by Big Ag.

This simply isn't true. Over the past decade, hundreds of independent researchers have published peer-reviewed safety studies. At least a dozen medical and scientific groups worldwide, including the World Health Organization and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have stated that the GMOs currently approved for market are safe.

7) Claim: Genetically modified crops cause farmers to overuse pesticides and herbicides.

This claim requires a little parsing. Two relevant GMOs dominate the market. The first enables crops to express a protein from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is toxic to certain insects. It's also the active ingredient in pesticides used by organic farmers. Bt crops have dramatically reduced reliance on chemical insecticides in some regions, says Bruce Tabashnik, a University of Arizona entomologist.

The second allows crops to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate so that farmers can spray entire fields more liberally yet kill only weeds. Glyphosate use has skyrocketed in the U.S. since these GMOs were introduced in 1996. But glyphosate is among the mildest herbicides available, with a toxicity 25 times less than caffeine. Its use has decreased reliance on more toxic alternatives, such as atrazine.

8) Claim: GMOs create super-insects and super-weeds.

If farmers rely too heavily on Bt or glyphosate, then pesticide resistance is inevitable, says Tabashnik. That's evolution at work, and it's analogous to antibiotics creating hardier bacteria. It is an increasing problem and could lead to the return of harsher chemicals. The solution, he says, is to practice integrated pest management, which includes rotating crops. The same goes for any type of farming.

9) Claim: GMOs harm beneficial insect species.

This has been been partly debunked. Bt insecticides attach to proteins found in some insects' guts, killing select species. For most insects, a field of Bt crops is safer than one sprayed with an insecticide that kills indiscriminately. But monarch butterflies produce the same proteins as one of Bt's target pests, and a 1999 Cornell University lab experiment showed that feeding the larvae milkweed coated in Bt corn pollen could kill them. Five studies published in 2001, however, found that monarchs aren't exposed to toxic levels of Bt pollen in the wild.

A 2012 paper from Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota suggested glyphosate-tolerant GMOs are responsible for monarchs' recent population decline. The herbicide kills milkweed (the larvae's only food source) in and near crops where it's applied.

10) Claim: Modified genes spread to other crops and wild plants, upending the ecosystem.

The first part could certainly be true: Plants swap genetic material all the time by way of pollen, which carries plant DNA—including any genetically engineered snippets.

According to Wayne Parrott, a crop geneticist at the University of Georgia, the risk for neighboring farms is relatively low. For starters, it's possible to reduce the chance of cross-pollination by staggering planting schedules, so that fields pollinate during different windows of time. (Farmers with adjacent GMO and organic fields already do this.) And if some GMO pollen does blow into an organic field, it won't necessarily nullify organic status. Even foods that bear the Non-GMO Project label can be 0.5 percent GMO by dry weight.

As for a GMO infiltrating wild plants, the offspring's survival partly depends on whether the trait provides an adaptive edge. Genes that help wild plants survive might spread, whereas those that, say, boost vitamin A content might remain at low levels or fizzle out entirely.

The Rise of GMO Crops

In the U.S., farmers have been planting increasing amounts GMO crops since the seeds became commercially available in 1996. Corn, cotton, and soy—which together occupy about 40 percent of U.S. cropland—are the three crops with the highest GMO fraction by area, each more than 90 percent in 2013.

The GMO fraction by area of corn, cotton, and soy in the top states that grow those crops.Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Graphic by Rebecca Lantner.

Dinner, Dissected

Very few genetically modified crops end up on plates, but the ones that do can be found in roughly two-thirds of processed foods sold in the U.S. Genetically modified bacteria and yeasts are also critical to the production of some foods, including many wines and cheeses.

Cheese

Rennet is key in making firm cheeses—specifically, an enzyme called chymosin in the rennet helps harden cheese. Traditionally, cheesemakers use rennet from the lining of cow stomachs to get their chymosin—but an estimated 80 to 90 percent of hard cheeses in the U.S. are made with bacteria modified with the rennet-producing cow gene.

Corn

Trait: Tolerates herbicides; resists insects
Total U.S. crop, by acreage: 85% herbicide-tolerant; 76% insect-resistant
Found in: Processed foods, such as crackers and cereals; corn on the cob; livestock feed

Cotton

Trait: Tolerates herbicides; resists insects
Total U.S. crop, by acreage: 82% herbicide-tolerant; 75% insect-resistant
Found in: Processed foods, including salad dressings; livestock feed

Papaya

Trait: Resists ringspot virus
Total U.S. crop, by acreage: More than 50%
Found in: Whole fruit and other products

Rapeseed

Trait: Tolerates herbicides
Total U.S. crop, by acreage: More than 50%
Found in: Canola oil; processed foods

Soy

Trait: Tolerates herbicides
Total U.S. crop, by acreage: 93%
Found in: Processed foods, such as cereals and breads; food additives, such as lecithin; livestock feed

Squash

Trait: Resists various viruses
Total U.S. crop, by acreage: 12%
Found in: Whole vegetables and other products

Sugar beets*

Trait: Tolerates herbicides
Total U.S. crop, by acreage: 95%
Found in: Refined sugar

Wine

Certain wine yeasts have been modified to make wine production easier, and prevent the production of harmful fermentation byproducts. One example is yeast strain ML01 in the U.S., which prevents the production of histamines that can trigger headaches. It also improves flavor and color.

*No modified proteins remain in the final product.

The Future Of GMOs: Gene Editing

Today's most common GMO technology, recombinant DNA, inserts genes into a plant's cells via bacteria or specialized delivery tools, but it involves some trial and error. A new method called gene editing uses enzymes to snip out a specific bit of DNA to either delete it or replace it. This allows for more precise changes to a plant's genome. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley are already working with it to create virus-resistant cassava.

Gene editing may also provide fodder for fresh controversy. Current GMO methods leave a trace behind—for example, a bit of the DNA from bacterium used to insert new genes. The enzymes used in gene editing don't leave such a fingerprint, so future genetically modified plants will be harder to detect with tests.

This article originally appeared in the July 2014 issue of_ Popular Science_.

Note (7/17/2014, 6:30pm EDT): Due to an editor's mistake, a previous version of this story misstated several details about genetically modified wines and cheeses. We regret the error.

Seeds of Sweet Corn

Photo from the USDA

Sometimes even a high-tech heist requires a little digging around in the dirt.

Earlier this month, a federal court indicted a Chinese national for trying to steal GMO corn technology from DuPont, Monsanto, and AgReliant Genetics. The scientist's arrest is just the latest in a series of indictments against six other people linked to a Beijing seed-development company called Dabeinong Technology Group Co. The FBI alleges the Dabeinong staff were part of a years-long seed collection effort that sometimes involved some low-tech methods. Science magazine reports:

The U.S.-based defendants roamed rural Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa in rental cars, digging up corn seedlings, stealing ears of corn, and stealing or illegally obtaining packaged seed, according to court documents. In 2011, a DuPont Pioneer field manager spotted one alleged thief on his knees digging in a field, as a collaborator waited in a nearby parked car.

And from Chemical & Engineering News:

To get the seed back to China, the government says, one defendant tucked the stolen kernels into Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn boxes packed into his luggage. A second defendant traveling back to China tried to conceal the seed corn in Pop Weaver boxes.

What's at stake here aren't the genetically modified seeds that farmers buy and plant. Presumably you could get those by pretending to be a farmer and signing an agreement with a GMO company (although that might present its own difficulties: What if a company representative comes to check on your "farm"?). Instead, the FBI alleges Debeinong staff tried to steal the seeds and seedlings of the "parent" plants that companies crossbreed to create the seeds they sell to farmers.

Parent plants are much more valuable than the GMO seeds farmers buy. A farmer who plants a cross-bred GMO corn crop could keep the resulting seeds and re-plant them, if she wanted. (I mean technically she could, because the seeds aren't sterile, as is often alleged, but she would likely face legal repercussions.) However, a crop grown from cross-bred seeds will contain a mix of corn types, most them inferior in quality. Parent plants, on the other hand, breed true generation after generation, carrying the traits companies engineered into them. The sequences of parent plants' genes represent some of the companies' most important intellectual property.

[Science, Chemical & Engineering News. See also these court documents from December 2013, posted by NPR]

We were not at all surprised that “Core Truths,” our July feature about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), garnered a large response—nor were we shocked that much of it was critical. We don’t have the space here to do your dozens of letters and emails justice, but here’s a breakdown of reader opinion:

To address some of your comments and concerns about this complex topic in a nuanced way, writer Brooke Borel has devoted a set of blog posts to GMOs. Read more at popsci.com/GMOs.

_This article originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of _Popular Science.

Corn Field

AmeriFlux

Crop-munching caterpillars in Brazil are no longer put off by genetically modified plants designed to kill them, Reuters reports. The report is just the latest in a series that have emerged over the past few years.

In this case, the GM plant is Bt corn and the pest in question is the Spodoptera frugiperda, which is native to tropical regions of the Americas. Bt plants are engineered so that they have genes from a soil bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis. The genes produce crystalline chemicals that kill insect larvae when they eat it. A larva that chows down on a Bt-crystal-producing GM plant soon stops eating. A few days later, it dies.* In addition to Bt corn, Bt cotton is popular.

Yet resistance to Bt crops has been occurring with pest species throughout the world. The first publicly announced case of insects in a field evolving resistance to Bt plants occurred in India in 2009. The first U.S. case followed in 2011. Since then, there have been dozens of similar incidents. In 2013, a team of entomologists and agriculture scientists reviewed 77 previous studies about international Bt crops. The team found that in 2005, only one of the 13 pest species examined could eat Bt plants without dying. But by 2013, five species could eat Bt plants.

The first engineered Bt plant was registered by a U.S. company in 1995, but not long afterward, scientists noted that insects would likely evolve resistance to them. Controlling pests, whether it's with microbes in a hospital or grubs in a field, is always an arms race against evolution. That evolution happens whether you use genetic engineering or plain old spraying.

Controlling pests, whether it's with microbes in a hospital or grubs in a field, is always an arms race against evolution.

The rising Bt resistance means that farmers will likely ramp up their insecticide use. One group of Brazilian farmers even wants GMO companies to reimburse them for the additional insecticides they had to use because their Bt crops failed to deter pests. Companies are also likely developing new GMO crops, perhaps with more insect toxins engineered into them, to combat the newly evolved resistance. There is already a second generation of genetically modified, Bt crops that make two Bt toxins instead of just one. Some pests have evolved resistance against those plants, however.

There are some scientifically proven ways to slow bugs' ability to adapt to GMO toxins. Planting a mix of GMO and non-GMO plants helps. So does planting first- and second-generation Bt crops separately. Both strategies lessen the deadly pressure against insects susceptible to Bt poisoning, so they'll evolve more slowly.

Seed company Dow Agrosciences told Reuters that Dow representatives taught Brazilian farmers these strategies. The companies' instructions were confusing, a lawyer representing the farmers told Reuters, and there were not enough non-GMO seeds available for them to really put the strategies to work.

*P.S. What about the butterflies?!: Most non-scientist Americans first learned about Bt corn when a study came out finding that pollen from the corn may kill caterpillars of the monarch butterfly. Later studies have found that Bt corn doesn't significantly affect the numbers of monarch butterflies, although other modern farming practices may.

[Reuters]

Science!

Real Vegan Cheese

Real Vegan Cheese works out of the biohacker space Counter Culture Labs located in Oakland, Calif.

A group of Oakland, California-based biohackers believe they can create “real vegan cheese.” Their goal - a cheese made with no animal products that fully evokes the real dairy deal – has struck a nerve: Real Vegan Cheese's crowdfunding campaign Indiegogo has surged many thousands of dollars past its initial funding goal of $15,000. It ends on August 10.

Here's how the group intends to do it, as reported in the East Bay Express:

The team will insert bovine DNA — which is chemically synthesized and does not come from an animal — into living baker's yeast cells, temporarily turning the yeast into a so-called "protein factory" that produces milk protein. The biohackers then extract that protein from the yeast and combine it with water, vegetable butter, and vegan sugar (instead of lactose), to make a milk substitute. Finally, this vegan milk can be turned into Real Vegan Cheese in the same way that normal cheese is produced from cow milk. The final food product will be a semi-hard cheese like Gouda. It will be totally vegan — and lactose-free.

"No animal is tortured in the production of this," said Counter Culture Labs member Ahnon Milham, who is vegan. "You don't have to worry about all the hormones and antibiotics."

Real Vegan Cheese also claims their product could “address future food scarcity concerns,” since “yeast are renewable and the processes to cheese are nearly limitless,” and could also curb dairy farming's impacts on the environment – such as emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas, from cow farts and decomposing manure.

Could the yeast hacks and subsequent processing that Real Vegan Cheese proposes really work?

Responding to our questions via blog post, "Dr. Ricky," the pseudonymous writer behind "Science Based Cuisine" stated that “the campaign makes some scientifically dubious promises" because cheese-making is more complex at the molecular level than Real Vegan Cheese either knows or is letting on.

“Milk is chock full of a structure known as micelles,” Dr. Ricky writes, which form a framework that holds and transports lots of calcium to mammal offspring. This molecular structure is intrinsic to forming curds, a cheese precursor, which won't appear simply as a result of mixing several ingredients into a milk-like fluid.

“And leaving out lactose," Doc writes, "means that the microbes that can be supported would be quite different from the conventional cheese production." Meaning that they might come up with something edible, but what to call it depends upon how you define both "cheese" and "vegan," and whether you call yeast animals or plants.

But synthetic biologist and writer Christina Agapakis, a postdoctoral research fellow at University of California, Los Angeles, thinks Real Vegan Cheese could work. “It can sometimes be tricky to express proteins at high yield in yeast,” she wrote in email, “but the goals of the project aren't unreasonable.”

The project is likely to encounter the same technical and economic hurdles as any biotech endeavor in scaling up to mass production, however, combined with challenges unique to cultured dairy foods.

“Making good cheese isn't just a matter of getting animal vs. vegetable proteins,” Agapakis writes “but also in the quality of the milk and the way that the cheese is made: the way it's processed, the microbes that are added, and the way it's aged.”

But, notes Agapakis, there is already a food on the market that's comparable to a vegan cheese: tofu. Tofu is made by curdling soy milk, then draining and pressing the results into blocks. Tofu can also be pressed, fermented and aged to create varied textures and flavors, just like different dairy cheeses.

"I think it's great that they are bringing more attention to the impacts of animal agriculture and dairy farming in particular," writes Agapakis, "but I think it's also important (or at least interesting and relevant) to highlight the range and diversity of vegan options that are out there already. I think it's not really fair that they are using the 'vegan food sucks' narrative, mostly because there's such a huge range of things out there that are actually pretty tasty!"

Ordinary Russet Potatoes

Photo by ZooFari, released into the public domain

There's a new Mr. Potato in town. This weekend, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a few new genetically modified potato varieties for farmers to grow commercially. There are genetically modified versions of the popular Russet potato and the Atlantic potato, the New York Times reports.

When fried, the new potatoes, called Innate potatoes, produce less of a chemical called acrylamide. Acrylamide appears in some starchy foods when they're cooked at high temperatures. It's most abundant in French fries and potato chips. It also appears in tobacco smoke. Scientists think acrylamide raises people's risk for certain cancers, but it's not clear how much acrylamide people to have to eat to raise their risk for cancer… so it's not clear how much eating Innates would lower their risk, the New York Times reports. Innate potatoes also bruise less than non-GMO potatoes, a quality that farmers and shippers prefer.

The potatoes are part of a newer generation of genetically modified crops that:

1. are made by a newer genetic technique called RNA interference, and
2. are made with traits that consumers may want, not just farmers and shippers.

Previously, genetically modified crops in the U.S. were created with qualities that benefit farmers and shippers only, such as being Roundup Ready. (Outside of the U.S., researchers have developed GMO crops to help combat malnutrition.)

Another GMO crop of the new style that's close to approval is the Arctic apple. Arctic Grannys and Arctic Goldens are modified so that they'll stay white longer after being sliced. Both Arctic apples and Innate potatoes get their improved qualities from genes taken from other varieties of their own kind. That is, Innate potatoes have added gene fragments taken from other cultivated and wild potatoes, while Arctic apples have added apple genes. That contrasts with today's most popular genetically engineered crops, which get their new qualities from genes taken from different species, such as bacteria.

Companies are hoping GMO-wary shoppers will find their same-species-only products more appealing… but that remains to be seen. Both have faced loud resistance from anti-GMO groups.

[New York Times]

Genetically modified apples may soon hit the market

Photograph by Travis Rathbone; Stylist: Sarah Guido for Halley Resources

Last night, about 450 people packed into New York City's Kaufman Center to hear a genetics professor and Monsanto's chief technology officer debate against researchers who are against the use of any genetic engineering technology. Among the audience members were writers for environmental magazines, a well-known biologist who had invented major genetic techniques, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. It was a sold-out show.

At this debate, and others put on by host Intelligence Squared U.S., the most fun part is that before the debate, and again after, audience members vote whether they're for or against the debate topic. Whichever side gains the most support wins. This time, one side had an unusually large win.

Before the debate, 30 percent of the audience said they were against genetically engineering crops, 32 percent said they were for it, and 38 percent were undecided. In the end, 31 percent were against—and 60 percent were for, a gain of 28 percentage points. The average wining margin in the last ten Intelligence Squared U.S. debates was around 18 percentage points. The final vote also contrasts with what national polls say about how American feel about GM foods.

A Followup Chat

© Samuel Lahoz Photography

Science show host Bill Nye talks with Monsanto chief technology officer Robert Fraley.

"The 'for' people were just so much more on point than the 'against' people," Nye told Popular Science after the show. Nye himself worries that genetically modified crops aren't studied for a long enough time for their environmental effects before they're planted on farms. Crops get about five years of testing before they're sold in the U.S., Monsanto CTO Robert Fraley says.

"I'm still not satisfied, as a scientist, as a voter, that five years is enough," Nye says. Still, in terms of the debate itself: "The GMO people were much better spoken." If Nye were in charge of drawing the line, he would draw it at combining ova and sperm in a lab, not at engineering pieces of genetic material into plant embryos.

On Stage at the Debate

© Samuel Lahoz Photography

The "for" side argued there's strong scientific consensus, including statements from organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S.' National Academy of Sciences, that genetically engineered plants are safe to eat. Society can't afford to toss out this important technical tool. "GM is sometimes uniquely able to deliver a useful trait, like crops that are more resilient to climate change," said Alison Van Eenennaam, a geneticist at the University of California at Davis who accompanied Fraley on the "for" side. "The benefits of GM are too great to vote anything but yes for GM tonight."

The "against" side argued there haven't been enough long-term studies of GMOs' food safety. "I've read essentially all of the statements by various bodies," said Charles Benbrook, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Washington State University who argued against GM crops. "Most of the recommendations for better science, more careful risk assessment, and post-market surveillance that have been made for more than 15 years, in these reports, have not been acted upon."

In addition, Benbrook's partner on the "against" side, Margaret Mellon, argued that over the past 30 years, genetic engineers haven't made that many useful crops, except pesticide-resistant ones, which now suffer from resistant weeds. (Here at Popular Science, we think GM technology has created many beneficial plants.) "We need to be clear about what genetic engineering can't do," said Mellon, a founding scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Food and Environment Program. "We've got other technologies out there. They're far more powerful than genetic engineering."

Below is a video Intelligence Squared made of the debate. It's well worth a watch.

Chestnuts

Reuters

Roasting chestnuts on an open fire is supposed to be one of the quintessential Christmas experiences. But I'd never tasted nor smelled a roasted chestnut until I got into the genetics lab of William Powell at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York.

For 25 years, Powell and his colleague Charles Maynard have been using genetic engineering methods to try to revive the American chestnut tree. The tree once reigned over eastern forests from Maine to Georgia, composing up to 25 percent of the canopy and providing food for wildlife and lumber for people. Then, in the early 1900s, a fungus from Asia began to kill off billions of American chestnut trees, and to this day it still plagues the trees, and keeps the species from reasserting its dominance.

Young GMO Chestnut Trees

Popular Science

“If you don't let out the steam they explode,” Maynard explained, slitting three chestnuts with a pocket knife before putting them in the lab microwave. I asked if I could try a transgenic one, but Powell said he'd have to get FDA approval first. The resulting treat was starchy, with the texture of a chickpea, but a little more buttery. (Powell says they taste better when actually roasted, but the lab did not have an open fire handy.)

The team has created transgenic chestnut trees that use a wheat gene to fight blight. The trees are being grown in labs and test sites, and the team may soon seek federal approval to set them loose in forests.

The project has drawn mixed reactions. On the one hand, the team aims to restore the traditional, natural ecosystem of the east coast. On the other hand, they're trying to do that through genetic modification, a process long reviled by environmental activists, even though the science suggests the biotechnology is perfectly safe.

“No one's ever used the tools of genetic engineering to try to help the environment, and that's what we're doing here.”

“No one's ever used the tools of genetic engineering to try to help the environment, and that's what we're doing here,” says Powell. “A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction: GMO means bad, without even thinking. So we're going to have to challenge people to think about it.”

How It Works

Canker Sore

Popular Science

Chestnut blight has infected this tree, causing a canker that will eventually kill the tree down to its roots.

Chestnut blight is caused by a fungus that enters the tree through a wound in the bark. Once inside, the fungus releases oxalic acid to kill nearby tree tissue, getting it ready for the fungus to colonize and eat. Eventually the pathogen forms areas of dead tissue called cankers, which essentially strangle the tree, killing it down to the ground. The tree's roots may survive for a few years, sending up new shoots every spring, but chestnut blight has kept most of America's chestnut trees stunted.

The wheat gene in the transgenic trees codes for an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid. Without the acid to kill the tissue, the fungus, which feeds on dead things, can't move in. Instead it hangs out on the bark doing minimal damage. “It's a gene that billions of people eat every day,” says Powell. “If you eat wheat, you're eating this gene and you're most likely eating the enzyme that it produces.”

Within the past few months, the team has shown that their transgenic American chestnut trees are as much if not more blight-resistant than the Chinese chestnut tree, a different species of chestnut which naturally fights off the fungus.

The team has also been busy analyzing the environmental impacts of the transgenic trees—comparing the growth rates, effects on insects, and leaf litter decomposition, to make sure the transgenic trees act like regular chestnut trees. In study results that just came out this week, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory looked for abnormalities in the metabolites of the transgenic chestnuts. They found that the transgenic chestnuts contained less vitamin E, though the levels were still consistent with the ones seen in Chinese chestnut trees. So, so far it looks like the transgenic tree doesn't differ significantly from other chestnut trees.

The next logical step, says Powell, will be to seek regulatory approval from the FDA, USDA, and the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can start planting the trees far and wide. The applications would involve followup studies and a lot of questioning and answering, including addressing concerns from the public. The entire process could take about five years, Powell estimates, and is complicated by the fact that the transgenic chestnuts would need to be deemed safe to eat.

The Blowback

Not everyone is welcoming the trees with open arms. When the Post-Standard, a Syracuse-area newspaper, published an article about the transgenic trees' potential to revive American forests, it drew mixed feedback from readers. “The researchers' dream could become a nightmare if something goes wrong,” Martha Crouch from the anti-GMO organization Center For Food Safety, wrote in a letter to the paper. “GE trees will be difficult to recall once they spread.”

Another commentator called the trees “unnatural,” to which Powell responded:

“Horizontal gene transfer between unrelated species is not unnatural. It does happen in nature and is an important force in genetic diversity and evolution. But instead of happening randomly, genetic engineering allows some thought to be put in behind this natural process.”

In early December, the activist group called “The Campaign To Stop GE Trees” called on consumers to shut the project down, saying the transgenic trees are “unnecessary, undesirable,” and “unpredictable”.

Not everyone is welcoming the transgenic trees with open arms.

There may be an alternative way to repopulate the forests with chestnuts—a way that activists, Crouch included, tend to find more palatable. While Powell and Maynard are working with the New York branch of the American Chestnut Foundation to produce their transgenic trees, the national branch of the organization is trying to create a blight-resistant American chestnut by breeding it with the naturally resistant Chinese chestnut.

The national branch has been successful in creating blight-resistant American chestnut trees that derive 1/16 of their DNA from Chinese chestnut trees. But the problem with the crossbreeding method is that the Chinese chestnut fights blight using dozens of genes that need to work together. When the trees breed, these genes get all mixed up. Many of the offspring won’t inherit the full set of blight-resistant genes, so they’re less good at resisting blight. And the resistance gets more watered down in every passing generation. In Powell and Maynard's work, by comparison, only one gene needs to be present to confer resistance, and when the transgenic tree crosses with a wild tree, 50 percent of the offspring are highly blight-resistant.

“We're making a smaller change than the breeding program is doing, yet they don't have to test theirs at all,” says Powell. And sometimes that can be a problem. Researchers in Michigan once attempted to cross a European-Japanese hybrid chestnut tree to a Chinese chestnut tree, in an attempt to produce larger nuts. But the genes were incompatible and resulted in a condition known as internal kernel breakdown. A third of the offspring produced seeds that disintegrated within their shells.

“These are species that evolved on opposite sides of the globe,” says Powell. “You can breed them, but they're not the same tree.”

Nevertheless, he says the national branch is doing good work, and someday he hopes the two programs can cross-breed their trees to make an even better tree.

Reviving Chestnuts From Ground Up

Maynard's lab manager, Linda McGuigan, tenderly nurtures the transgenic trees from the time they are embryos. While they're still about the size of a watch battery, the embryos get cloned and transformed, in a process that uses Agrobacterium to insert the wheat gene into the embryo's genome. Then, for the better part of a year, the developing trees are moved from growth medium to growth medium, swaddled in bags and boxes that help to maintain precise light, temperature, and humidity conditions. Finally they're moved into a greenhouse, from whence they might be planted on one of seven field locations around New York State.

Transgenic Chestnut Embryos Germinating

Popular Science

Powell, McGuigan and I walked through one such pilot site, just a few miles away from the labs. The trees look like sticks in the November ground, and their leaves crunch under our feet. The fields contain several different plots of small trees, planted at different times and different stages of the research, surrounded by fences to keep the deer out.

Looking at a plot of trees with one wild parent—the plot that proved the gene stays strong even in the second generation—Powell tells me about the lab's intention to plant 10,000 more of the transgenic chestnut trees on pilot sites. And they're not alone in that goal. At the time, the team was just a few hundred dollars short of meeting their crowdfunding target of $50,000 to grow the 10,000 trees. By the time the campaign closed on December 5th, they'd raised more than $100,000.

In several years, Powell hopes, the chestnut trees will be deregulated, and ready for people to plant and eat. The team says they won't patent the transgenic trees, and that they don't intend to gain a profit from them. They want the trees to be freely available, so that anybody can plant them at will, to eventually revive the East Coast's historical forests.

The American chestnut tree probably won't gain a strong foothold in the forests for at least another 100 years, Powell estimates. And the restoration will be a slow process, which will completely depend on the public's willingness to participate. “These trees are not weeds. They do not spread quickly. So it really depends on people planting them.”

Chestnut Burr

Popular Science

Conventional Granny Smith Apple vs. Arctic Granny Smith Apple

Arctic Apples

The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the country’s first genetically modified apples for sale this Friday. The apples are dosed with extra copies of apple genes so that their flesh stays whiter longer after they have been sliced. The apples’ maker, a small company called Okanagan Specialty Fruits, has named the apples “Arctic” and plans to sell Arctic versions of Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples.

This approval has been in the works for a while. Throughout 2014, experts kept thinking it was imminent. In fact, it was a bit of a surprise that GMO potatoes--another first--garnered USDA approval before the apples did. Both the apples and the potatoes use a similar, newer GMO technology. Compared to older methods, the new tech is more precise. It also uses genes taken from related plants so that the GMO potato has added genes from domestic and wild potatoes, while the GMO apple has added apple genes. You can read more about how the technique works here.

USDA approval means the agency has determined Arctic apple trees are safe for other crops. However, the USDA doesn’t assess whether GMOs are safe for people to eat; that’s the Food and Drug Administration’s job. Okanagan has submitted Arctic apples for FDA safety testing voluntarily, and the FDA is still working on those tests, the Wall Street Journal reports. The GMO potato is already FDA-approved. But GMO crop companies often don’t need such testing before selling their wares. The FDA treats GMO crops as “generally recognized as safe” and that’s the case for Arctic apples.

The first few GMO apples may appear in stores in 2017, according to the Wall Street Journal. Okanagan Specialty Fruits says it plans to put snowflake symbols on the apples’ labels to distinguish them from non-modified fruits.

[Wall Street Journal]

Red blood cell infected with malaria parasite (colorized in blue)

NIAID/Flickr

In outbreak news

The Ebola outbreak continues in West Africa. Liberia was reportedly Ebola-free earlier this month, but has since had a new patient. The severity of the outbreak in Sierra Leone prompted a three-day lockdown. And while exciting new research points to potential Ebola vaccines, testing the versions that are ready for clinical trials is proving difficult, as Amy Maxmen reports in this great Al Jazeera America piece. A spot of good news: recent research suggests the virus might not be mutating quickly, which means it isn’t likely growing more virulent. For more on that, read this piece at Scientific American.

But, even after the outbreak is finally under control, there will be lasting negative effects. For more on that, check out this Nature piece by Erika Check Hayden on the outbreak’s impact on maternal health, as well as this Wired piece by Maryn McKenna that explains how Ebola may interrupt childhood immunizations that could lead to more cases of other diseases, such as measles.

And speaking of measles, researchers have confirmed that low vaccination rates helped spread the recent outbreak in Disneyland.

In other microbe news

New research suggests that, in rare cases, particularly in children, malaria parasites can get caught in the brain where they affect the center responsible for respiration. It may be that getting the patients on a ventilator early will help them survive. For more, listen to and read this NPR piece or read at the New York Times.

Clostridium difficile infections may be a bigger problem at big hospitals, reports Alexandra Ossola at Popular Science.

Carl Zimmer has a couple of great pieces this month, one on different origins of HIV and the other explaining how malaria may produce lemon scents to attract mosquitoes.

Medical tools are spreading antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and they need to be altered in order to lower the chances of contamination. Read more in this Katie Palmer Wired piece.

Venom may offer new drugs to treat bacterial illnesses. Read this bizarre tale at Mosaic, by Christie Wilcox, which describes a woman who may have gotten ride of her Lyme disease infection with bee stings.

Check out the new documentary Resistance, which traces the current antibiotic crisis.

And Esther Inglis-Arkell at io9 has a horrifying review of the ways we used to treat syphilis.

In vaccine news

Alexis Madrigal has an intriguing piece at Fusion that describes a DARPA plan to create DNA vaccines, which would have applications for Ebola and a slew of other diseases.

Jason Motlagh has an epic longread at National Geographic on the difficulties of vaccinating for polio in war-torn Syria.

And earlier this month in Germany, a court ruled against a vaccine skeptic who had offered €100,000 to anyone who could prove that measles is caused by a virus. The man has to pay up after a researcher sent him a scientific paper on the topic.

In agriculture news

The World Health Organization released a report suggesting, among other things, that the widely-used herbicide glyphosate probably causes cancer. This may not be as scary as it sounds, though. Read more at Grist, NPR, and Nature.

The Food and Drug Administration announced that new GMO potatoes and apples are safe and are nutritionally comparable to conventional potatoes and apples. Read more from Andrew Pollack at the New York Times.

Some dairy farmers in the US are apparently breaking the rules on antibiotics, which are not supposed to show up in cow milk. Meanwhile, pig farmers worldwide are using more antibiotics to raise pork compared to cattle and poultry farmers.

And to catch up on the latest thinking on the global bee decline, check out this Vox piece by Brad Plumer and this Wired piece by Gwen Pearson. Short version: it’s complicated.

In creepy crawly news

Speaking of Gwen, she has another fun Wired piece about the rats of New York City. Check it out here.

Two destructive termite species in Florida appear to be breeding an especially devastating hybrid, aka the “super-termite.” Listen to this All Things Considered story for more.

Aeon has a lovely essay by Andrea Appleton, which explores different cultures’ views on insects.

And check out this awesome series of parasite portraits by artist Marcus DeSieno, including one where he caught a pair of flukes having sex.

Ebola virus infects a monkey cell.

NIAID/Flickr

Your monthly roundup of infestations, contagions, and controls from around the web.

In outbreak news

The Ebola outbreak continues, and Erika Check Hayden has a great piece in Wired about the difficulties in finding a treatment, which also explains why antibody treatments could eventually help cure a range of diseases.

Similarly, figuring out a cure for MERS is proving difficult, partly because it isn’t infecting enough people (although, of course, we don’t really want an epidemic). For more, read this piece by Sarah Zhang, also at Wired.

The bird flu outbreak in the U.S. is getting really expensive and it may get worse, says Maryn McKenna at her NatGeo Germination blog.

Meanwhile, in other chicken news, there is apparently a salmonella outbreak because people are kissing chickens. So, don’t do that. Read this Julia Belluz Vox piece for more.

In vaccine news

[Good news on the Ebola front])http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33733711): a new vaccine shows promise, apparently protecting 100% of people vaccinated (although that may change as more data comes in).

Thanks to vaccination efforts, Nigeria has been polio-free for a full year. It’ll have to remain that way for two more years before the World Health Organization issues an official certification.

A new dengue vaccine works in people nine years old and up but may not be safe for younger kids. Arielle Duhaime-Ross has a nuanced story on the vaccine at The Verge.

And in sad news, a 21-year-old woman in Washington State died from the measles, the first confirmed U.S. case in years. Read this post by Michael Specter at the New Yorker for more.

In agriculture news

A beetle called the coffee berry borer threatens coffee crops, and new research shows how it’s able to consume (and survive) such impressive amounts of caffeine. As io9 puts it, the insect can ingest the equivalent of a person having 500 shots of espresso in one day.

William Saletan has an epic piece at Slate about GMOs.

And speaking of GMOs, some of Monsanto’s plant patents just expired, which means farmers will be able to use the tech without paying the company a fee. For more, here's a story by Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/539746/as-patents-expire-farmers-plant-generic-gmos/).

In creepy crawly news

Genetically-modified mosquitoes were officially released in Brazil in order to fight Dengue, Carl Engelking reports at Discover.

In other GMO insect news, new research on an engineered moth suggests it may help crash wild populations of the pest, which causes damage to cruciferous vegetables. Read more at BBC.

And Daniel Viola at Motherboard has a cringe-inducing tale about black market parasites, which some desperate folks are putting into their own bodies to try to treat chronic illnesses.

The vomiting machine was designed to scale the human stomach, esophagus geometry, and vomiting pressures.

Grace Tung-Thompson and Dominic Libera.

Your monthly roundup of infestations, contagions, and controls from around the web.

In disease news

Although Ebola isn’t making many headlines, infections persist in West Africa. Last week, there were three new cases in Guinea. Now, health experts are also starting to see some of the symptoms that linger in those who survived. Read more at Quartz.

Meanwhile, Legionnaires’ diseaseappeared in the South Bronx earlier this month, infecting at least 124 and killing 12. Two new cases, apparently unrelated to the Bronx outbreak, were reported last week.

Scientists may have a new way to track outbreaks around the world: by looking at airplane poop. Read this great Wired piece by Sarah Zhang for more. Related: Scientists made a vomiting robot to understand how diseases like norovirus spread.

The U.S. has seen an unusual number of cases of plague this year—at least 11 since April. Those cases have included a kid camping in Yosemite, an adult in Pueblo County, Colorado, and a teen in Georgia, who may be the state’s first plague patient in history.

And Mosaic has a fantastic piece by Carrie Arnold exploring how Chagas disease may be creeping into Texas.

In vaccine news

A new Ebola vaccine is proving highly effective, and it may change how we do clinical trials. Here’s hoping.

New research suggests that we may be closer to a universal flu shot—in mice, anyway. Read on at New Scientist.

A new study suggests that doing away with lax vaccine exemption laws may encourage more people to vaccinate. Read more at Quartz.

And this neat Smithsonian piece tells the story of the smallpox peace gun (yes, peace gun).

In agriculture news

The patents on Monsanto’s Roundup Reading soybeans may have expired earlier this month, but that doesn’t mean generic GMOs will hurt the company's bottom line, argues Sophia Chen at Wired.

Speaking of GMOs, Ted Genoways has an epic piece about Chinese spies stealing American intellectual property, and how that feeds into the global fight for the control of agriculture. Read on at the New Republic.

Despite efforts to curb outbreaks on spinach farms, a new study suggests that both salmonella and E. coli have increased over the past 9 years. Read more at io9.

And check out the bizarre tale at the New Yorker of the former president of the Peanut Corporation of America, who is facing life in prison for hiding evidence of a salmonella outbreak that made 20,000 people sick and killed 9.

In invasive species news

This Harper’s piece is a fascinating look at invasive species control—and the definition of invasive, for that matter—that takes an odd turn into glyphosate and GMOs.

And ignore everything you thought you knew about the invasive kudzu in the American South and read this great history at Smithsonian.

In creepy crawly news

Researchers may have discovered a new option for mosquito repellent that smells way better than DEET: sweetgrass. But it’ll be a while before you see it on store shelves. Read more at BBC.

Melinda Wenner Moyer has a great piece at Nature that has pretty much everything you want to know about ticks.

And a cache of lice combs—lice included!—thought to be between 240 and 800 years old was discovered in northern Chile. Read more at Scientific American. And maybe we’ll need them. Judy Stone at Forbes explains how lice are growing increasingly resistant to insecticide treatments.

Clear Labs is compiling a comprehensive database of the DNA found in food.

Screenshot from Clear Labs promotional video

It’s hard to know what’s in your food. While some people find it scary to read the labels on processed foods, it’s scarier to know that these labels can sometimes be inaccurate, if an unrecorded ingredient was added somewhere in the manufacturing process. Startup Clear Labs wants to use genetic analysis change that; yesterday the company announced that it is rolling out a database of the genetic signatures of food, called Clear View.

“The idea was to bring a new kind of transparency to the food industry,” says Mahni Ghorashi, the Chief Marketing Officer and cofounder of Clear Labs. Since the company’s inception in 2014, its researchers have been conducting genetic sequencing on a huge range of food products and compiling them into a database. Now that the company has launched, it plans to make the database available to food manufacturers so they can better understand the raw ingredients that go into their products, and help alert retailers selling that food if labels are inaccurate or if the food is contaminated.

If a retailer or manufacturer wants to know more about a particular food, the company can ship a sample to Clear Labs or an associated third-party lab, where researchers perform next-generation sequencing on the sample. The researchers sequence all the DNA found in the sample and compare them to what's in the database, which contains information from the company's previous tests and other open source genetic databases through the NIH. That could help companies identify gluten in foods that are labeled gluten-free, for example, or even disease-causing bacteria before the product even reaches a customer.

Say, for example, you're the purveyor of a health food store and you suspect that the cilantro you're thinking of selling might be a genetically modified strain. Your customers would probably want to know that. So you send a sample to Clear Labs, which compares the sample's DNA to that of the cilantro already in the database. And if the researchers happen to find some E. coli bacteria in the sample, they can warn of you of that, too, so that you can pull it from the shelves before anyone gets sick.

The Clear Labs founders claim that, at the end of the day, customers benefit because companies will label their products more accurately and they can be more confident in the quality of their food. And at a time when people are uncertain about what’s going into their foods and demand better labeling, that may be true. But if consumers don’t have direct access to this information, they are still relying on food manufacturers to be honest about what’s in their products, and that reliance is exactly what got us to this current place of mistrust.

The Clear View database also doesn’t include information about synthetic chemicals and hormones, some of the components in food that are most distressing to consumers. “DNA is a universal alphabet that can be applied to any item that you test,” says Sasan Amini, the CEO and co-founder of Clear Labs. “But there are things about food quality that not encompassed by DNA, like pesticides in food, hormones, and antibiotics. We are starting to look at non-DNA tests,” he says; presumably Clear Labs may incorporate that information in a future iteration.

Clear Labs is unlikely to be the silver bullet for the many ailments of the food industry. But systematically analyzing the genes found in our foods—and compiling a comprehensive database—may be just the kind of push the food industry needs to become more transparent. And maybe, slowly, the benefits of more accurate labels and purer ingredients will trickle down to consumers, too.

Food samples in the Clear Labs facility

Screenshot from Clear Labs promotional video

Simplot Potato

Sam Kaplan

This summer, food giant Simplot released genetically modified potatoes, designed to reduce bruising, the latest GMO on the market.

Each year, groceries, restaurants, and hotel chains collectively toss out some 400 million pounds of fresh potatoes due to bruising and black spots. (Consumers loathe a bruised spud.) Boise, Idaho, food giant Simplot—one of the largest privately held food producers in the nation—has now genetically modified potatoes so we’ll waste less. Its new Innate line of Russet Burbank (a standard for French fries), Atlantic (a chip staple), and Ranger Russet (an all-purpose potato) is bred to have less bruising. Compared with typical potatoes, Innates also have up to 70 percent less acrylamide—a potentially cancer-causing chemical formed when potatoes are cooked above 248 degrees, such as when frying French fries or baking chips. In other words, they’re healthier.

The new potatoes are among the latest GMOs with direct consumer benefits, joining the nonbrowning Arctic apple, and Pioneer’s Plenish soybean oil, which contains the healthy fat omega-9.

Simplot—an 86-year-old company that invented the frozen french fry and dehydrated potato—spent more than 14 years devising the Innate varieties. To create them, engineers extracted genes from cultivated and wild potatoes, and inserted them into the DNA of its target varieties. In a process that scientists call “gene silencing,” the new genes switch off the host genes that lead to bruising and acrylamide production.

Although 88 percent of scientists say GMOs are safe to eat, only 37 percent of the public agrees, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey.

This summer, Simplot’s new potato line began landing in produce aisles, on restaurant plates, and on room-service trays in hotels. (In 2012, consumers ate 52 pounds of potatoes per person.) But some big potato buyers, like McDonald’s, aren’t buying, likely because they fear consumers’ reaction. Although 88 percent of scientists say GMOs are safe to eat, only 37 percent of the public agrees, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey.

Still, it’s unlikely consumers will notice or appreciate the new spuds. “I’m not convinced that the fact that it’s low acrylamide will be looked upon by consumers as a big benefit,” says Greg Jaffe, the biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, “because I don’t think most consumers are aware of acrylamide and the issues around it.”

Hungry for more? Check out our future of food feature from the October 2015 issue of Popular Science.

The genetically modified lettuce wouldn't look any different than this one.

HebiFot via Pixabay

For decades, scientists have modified plants’ DNA in the lab to make the crops more appealing, or to better resist pests or disease. And in spite of controversy, the advent of genetic editing enzyme CRISPR has sped up this process. Now a team of Korean researchers has altered the CRISPR complex so that it can knock out genes without introducing new ones, according to a study published this week in Nature Biotechnology. The modifications are so minor that they might not even qualify as genetically modified foods according to most regulatory definitions of GMO, as Nature News reports.

To modify the DNA in most cells, scientists program the protein Cas9 to find certain repetitions in the DNA. When it does, the enzyme can snip the strands of the DNA. The cell then goes to repair the DNA, which can sometimes introduce unintended new mutations. By changing how Cas9 gets assembled and transmitted to a cell, the researchers were able to knock out genes without adding any new ones. When the researchers tested their technique on tobacco, rice, and lettuce genes, they successfully changed the desired gene about 46 percent of the time.

This isn’t the first time scientists have used the CRISPR complex to edit crops. Some experts estimate that CRISPR-modified foods could be on your plate in five years.

But this new technique might sidestep the entire debate surrounding genetically modified foods. As they stand now, most countries' regulatory agencies define GMOs as crops that are modified in a way they would not be in nature. Since this technique does not introduce any foreign genes, it's feasible that these sorts of genetic changes could happennaturally, which could enable these crops to avoid regulation, as well as the entire debate surrounding GMOs. However, regulators are still catching up on how to regulate the most modern technologies including CRISPR, so that definition may change.

According to the Nature News piece, some plant genetics experts aren’t convinced that the researchers’ technique will be very successful with plant breeders. But the researchers themselves have high hopes. By knocking out the genes that allow disease to take hold, the scientists could save those crops most at risk, preserving them for future generations.

Brains! Some parasites love 'em.

Neil Conway/Flickr

Your monthly roundup of infestations, contagions, and controls from around the web.

In disease news

The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine went to researchers who discovered treatments for tropical diseases.

Researchers from the U.S. picked up a tropical disease during a research trip in Honduras, after getting bitten by sand flies.

An Oregon teen was diagnosed with plague. Although plague is rare in the U.S., we’ve seen a jump in cases this year.

These owls aren’t going to give you plague.

And speaking of plague, new researchsuggests that it may be much older than previously though.

In vaccine news

The World Health Organization recommended a new malaria vaccine for small pilot trials. But other recent research suggests that a mismatch between the targeted malaria proteins may decrease the vaccine’s effectiveness.

A clinical trial will test a new AIDS vaccine candidate.

An anti-vax group apparently funded a study that showed the opposite of what they were hoping: there is no link between vaccines and autism.

New research pointsout the weak component in the flu vaccine.

And here’s why you should get a tetanus shot.

In agriculture news

California has new—and strict—laws to curb antibiotic use on farms.

Which produces higher yields: Organic or conventional farming? Well, it’s complicated.

Researchers in Korea have figured out a way to use CRISPR to engineer plants yet potentially bypass safety rules.

In creepy crawly news

New research suggests that Lone Star ticks may be spreading an illness that was previously mistaken for the deadly Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Researchers are considering using ivermectin, one of the drugs involved in this year’s Nobel Prize, against malaria mosquitoes.

And just in time for Halloween, here are some parasites that are after YOUR BRAAAAAAAINS.

Courtesy of Manjul Dutt/UF/IFAS

Genetically modified limes

Left, a lime with genes from red grapes. Center, a lime with genes from the blood orange. Right, a control.

Thanks to a few genetic tweaks, your margarita could someday come in a lovely lavender shade—and be better for your health, too. Researchers at the University of Florida Citrus Research and Education Center have modified the genetic code of limes, making the popular fruit more resilient and healthier for you, and giving it a colorful new tinge. The researchers will publish their work in the January issue of the Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science, according to a press release.

The limes get their new purple hues from molecules called anthocyanins, which also give blueberries and red wine their distinctive shades. By adding genes from purple grapes and blood oranges to Mexican limes, the researchers created a lime that could synthesize its own anthocyanins. The researchers found that the new genes also changed the color of the lime's roots and leaves.

There’s no word yet on whether the genetic tweaks change the limes’ flavor, but they could be better for your health. Previousstudies have shown that anthocyanins are potent antioxidants that can reduce your likelihood of developing cancer, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.

The pretty new limes could also have a big effect on the Florida citrus industry. Though Florida produces many of the most popular varieties of oranges and grapefruits, blood oranges can’t grow there because they need colder nighttime temperatures and less humidity in order to thrive. For years, Florida orange growers have been trying to figure out how to cultivate the popular blood orange in the sunshine state, but have not yet found a way.

These genetically modified limes, which contain genes from the blood orange, might represent the first step towards developing a new type of blood orange that could grow in Florida’s warm, humid climate. Adding blood oranges to the list of Florida citrus could provide a bright spot in a bleak prognosis for the industry. As Florida’s citrus crops are increasingly threatened by bacteria, farmers are more open to disease-resistant versions of the fruit. That could make them welcome to modified versions of blood oranges, which, if they could thrive in Florida’s hot and humid conditions, would increase the farmers’ yields and income. However, it’s still not clear if consumers will be as enthusiastic.

Campbell Soup Company

Example of a Campbell GM label

On Thursday, Campbell Soup Company announced it would start labeling its products that are produced with genetically modified ingredients. While other major companies like General Mills are removing products with GM ingredients, as the New York Timesnotes, Campbell says it's taking this measure to remove confusion, and add more transparency for consumers.

"We have always believed that consumers have the right to know what’s in their food. GMO has evolved to be a top consumer food issue reaching a critical mass of 92 percent of consumers in favor of putting it on the label," wrote president and CEO Denise Morrison in a memo to employees about the decision. (Morrison is citing a Consumer Reports poll from 2014, and you can see a roundup of other polls here.)

But, notably the company is not disputing the safety of genetically modified ingredients--indeed, they're not removing them from their foods. "The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence indicates that GMOs are safe and that foods derived from crops using genetically modified seeds are not nutritionally different from other foods," Morrison wrote.

When it comes to a wider labeling mandate, the company supports it on a broad, federal level, rather than a state-by-state way of piecing together policy. Morrison cites Vermont's labeling law, which would mean that SpaghettiOs would be labeled for GMOs under the FDA's mandate, but SpaghettiOs with Meatballs, which as meat would fall under the USDA's purview, would not bear such a label.

Practically speaking, the example labels on Campbell's soups and other products appear to be rather simple. They say “Partially produced with genetic engineering. For more information about G.M.O. ingredients, visit WhatsinMyFood.com.” We can only imagine the traffic that will build up in the soup aisle, with shoppers pulling out smartphones to check whether the tomato soup has GM sugar beets or corn--spoiler alert, it has both.

The business reasons for introducing this labeling and supporting a wider policy are confusing. The labeling could scare away those who are wary of GMOs, though if the labels that make it on the food products are the same as shown in the example, the consumer would have to be looking for it to find it. And broadly labeling something as having genetically modified ingredients, some argue is just too broad.