Andrew Apel wrote: "Not too long ago, it made sense to argue that "native Mexican landraces" needed to be preserved because of their "biodiversity" and the "possible benefits" that might lie undiscovered in their germplasm. Seeds from these various landraces are held by CIMMYT at great expense, and are about to become obsolete and worthless....Seed banks and biodiversity are only important if your only available technology is conventional breeding. With more advanced knowledge and techniques, antique germplasm becomes increasingly irrelevant. If you need a trait (such as resistance to the European Corn Borer), you engineer it in--as with the YieldGard gene." Andrew, you are highly mistaken on this point. The seed banks and germplasm ARE important, especially in this early era of biotechnology and still relatively rudimentary knowledge of the specific function and workings of most genes/alleles in our crop species. Yes, you can engineer the desired traits into crops, but only if you have a template to work from in designing your synthetic gene construct.

YieldGuard is a great case-in-point. We got the template from natural proteins, not some completely synthetic conceptual approach. Without the natural bacterial protein and genes, we wouldn't have anything to work from and we wouldn't have bioengineered versions of Bt protein in our crops. We didn't make it up, we coopted it.

Tanksley and McCouch (Science 277:1063-1066, 1997) discuss this very topic at length, but they make their point about the need and potential of gene banks and wild crop progenators quite dramatically with two findings in rice and tomato. Using molecular linkage maps and a breeding technique referred to as the advanced backcross QTL (Quatitative Trait Loci mapping) method, it allows the testing of a subset of alleles from the wild or progenitor variety in the genetic background of a modern elite variety. To make this communication short, they used this advanced QTL method to identify superior alleles in the older or wild varieties. The result: they identified one allele in wild tomato that increased tomato solids yield by 50%!!!! They identified 2 alleles in rice that each increased rice yields in the highest-yielding modern Chinese rice hybrids by 17%!!!!! These are huge yield gains, simply from using a different version of one allele from the wild crop ancestors. There are no doubt some important alleles in the landraces of crops in our genebanks -- potential that will be unleashed in modern crop varieties by biotechnology, but only if we have a blueprint to follow.

Genebanks and landraces may eventually become obsolete and worthless, but not anytime soon. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to turn the world into a gene museum, or even much of Oaxaca, but I don't want to toss a valuable resource before we've extracted the value from it.

- Alex Avery, Hudson Institute

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