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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNucleic Acid Invaders from Food Confirmed
Just as many of us suspected all along.
New research confirms that DNA fragments derived from meals, large enough to carry complete genes, can escape degradation and enter the human circulatory system, and so can RNA, raising serious concerns over new nucleic acids introduced into the human food chain via genetically modified organisms.
A study led by Sándor Spisák who holds a joint appointment at Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and Harvard Medical School Boston, Massachusetts in the USA analysed over 1,000 human adult samples from four independent studies, and found DNA fragments derived from food in all plasma samples, some large enough to code for complete genes.
Previous animal feeding studies have demonstrated that a minor proportion of fragmented dietary DNA may resist digestion, but the degradation of long chains of DNA and the possible uptake and transport into the bloodstream are not at all understood. Circulating cell free DNA (cfDNA) in the human bloodstream, first described in 1948, are mostly double-stranded molecules with a wide range of fragment sizes from 180 - 21 k bp.
Most people think cfDNA are from apoptotic cells (resulting from programmed cell-death), and in different diseases such as inflammation, autoimmune, trauma and cancer, necrotic cells (from non-programmed cell death) may increase the amount. In fact, both DNA and RNA are found circulating in the bloodstream, and there is good evidence that they are actively secreted from living cells as a nucleic acid intercommunication system.
Ruh-roh...
superpatriotman
(6,249 posts)has never rang more true
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)She has a PhD. And is a Scientist working on proteins...
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Especially when their paycheck depends on it.
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)I trust her more than that article...
And HER paycheck has nothing to do with that....
She also rails against the Antivaxx crowd too
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)You may trust her. I would prefer to keep DNA fragments of GM food out of my bloodstream until we have done a little (no, a LOT) more unbiased research. Precautionary Principle and all that.
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)If you eat petty much any crop at all it has over time been genetically modified....even without the technology we have today....just saying.
Drew Richards
(1,558 posts)Big damn difference between natural selection and human organic hybridization of plants vs Genetic modification introducing ANIMAL proteins and RNA into a plant to make it...more drought resistant or higher abundant...
Sorry...
Even if this article is lame, biased and unscientifically authenticated the premise is still there...
We should not be gambling with what nature never intended or qualified in nature IE adding animal proteins to plants for genetic modification for consumption...
MattBaggins
(7,904 posts)Random internet articles that take a simple biological process and blow it way out of proportion?
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Talk it down. You can do it!
REP
(21,691 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I don't know the writer myself.
REP
(21,691 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Carry on.
REP
(21,691 posts)But hey, follow whomever you want. It neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket; just don't try to make me or others come along.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Just like our food.
AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)For example, with climate change, you still have those who deny that it even exists, or claim that it will only be good(yeah, not really) for the planet....and on the other extreme, you've got guys like David Wasdell or Guy McPherson, or John Greer, for example, who toot the horn of "Inevitable Human Permanent Decline/Extinction" every so often, based on nothing but rhetoric, and the occasional research, either poorly done hackwork or badly misintrepreted pieces of legitimate research.
You've also got a fair number of scientists who insist that consciousness is literally nothing more than brain fireworks, or that all NDEs are nothing more than fancy-pants illusions created by a malfunctioning brain, or that humans are actual apes(instead of being evolutionary "cousins" to apes, like raccoons are to bears, but perhaps a little closer), etc.
BTW, I'm not exactly a big fan of GMOs myself. I don't buy into any of the gloom-and-doom scenarios that are sometimes thrown around the place, but there are indeed legitimate concerns about their use, or misuse.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)MattBaggins
(7,904 posts)pnwmom
(108,977 posts)G_j
(40,367 posts)and worth our attention. thanks for posting
In reviewing the organisation, David Colquhoun accused the ISIS of promoting pseudoscience and specifically criticised Ho's understanding of homeopathy.[7]
Ho, together with Joe Cummins of the University of Western Ontario, has argued that a sterility gene engineered into a crop could be transferred to other crops or wild relatives and that "This could severely compromise the agronomic performance of conventional crops and cause wild relatives to go extinct". They argued that this process could also produce genetic instabilities, which might be "leading to catastrophic breakdown", and stated that there are no data to assure that this has not happened or cannot happen.[13] This concern contrasts with the reason why these sterile plants were developed, which was to prevent the transfer of genes to the environment by preventing any plants that are bred with or that receive these genes from reproducing.[14] Indeed, any gene that caused sterility when transferred to a new species would be eliminated by natural selection and could not spread.[15]
Ho has also argued that bacteria could acquire the bacterial gene barnase from transgenic plants. This gene kills any cell that expresses it and lacks barstar, the specific inhibitor of barnase activity. In an article entitled Chronicle of An Ecological Disaster Foretold, which was published in an ISIS newsletter, Ho speculated that if a bacterium acquired the barnase gene and survived, this could make the bacteria a more dangerous pathogen.[16]
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae-Wan_Ho#Institute_of_Science_in_Society
though Colquhoun seems to have an agenda also.
REP
(21,691 posts)G_j
(40,367 posts)Last edited Thu Jun 12, 2014, 03:15 AM - Edit history (1)
ISIS does seem to have a certain agenda. However, a pharmacologist who is particularly critical of alternative medicine?.. I'd look somewhere else..
REP
(21,691 posts)He's a researcher specializing in ion gap, which is somewhat interesting to those trying to treat certain intractable diseases. But carry on.
jeff47
(26,549 posts)DNA in your blood can't change DNA in your cells. Your DNA is in the nucleus of your cells. It's only there that your DNA can have an effect.
In fact, viruses have to work extremely hard to get to the point where they can infect your cells, because of that barrier. People who make genetically modified food also have to work very hard to get their modified genes to actually do something. You can't just dump some DNA on a plant and have it change the plant.
But let's take a look at the article:
So this article is covering a shocking new discovery....from 1948.
But it does to an excellent job of salesmanship!
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I don't know how great the potential for uptake is, but maybe it's not me that needs edumacating...
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)in their wonderful circle of profit.
jeff47
(26,549 posts)No, it's still you.
cfDNA has not been shown to affect anything. We've known about it for 66 years. If it had an effect, don'tcha think we'd have found it by now?
But you can get people excited, and receive more funding, if you throw out GMOs as a boogeyman. And when you have not-really-a-journal sites like ISIS willing to publish whatever you throw at them, it's even better.
All you need is a crowd of people who don't understand the basics of biology and DNA, and then pretend GMOs are magical beasts created in sinister Transylvanian labs by magical processes. And pretend that the magic leaks all over anything that the GMOs touch.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I just hold the wrong opinion...
jeff47
(26,549 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Since yours apparently is, perhaps you could comment on this paper from Nature (from 2011, not 1948): Exogenous plant MIR168a specifically targets mammalian LDLRAP1: evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA
The reason I ask is that is seems to provide evidence of just the kind of cross-kingdom genetic effects I'm interested in. So far, the only counter to it I've found is this: Plant RNA Paper Questioned. As you can see, this is not a peer-reviewed study, but simply an article exploring a an opinion controversy of the sort that always surrounds new scientific findings.
If you could debunk the original research (with peer-reviewed references of course) I'd be ever so grateful.
jeff47
(26,549 posts)That's signalling, not genes being expressed. The concern from ISIS is gene expression.
This paper is about as exciting and novel as both creatures using the same amino acids. They may use the same signalling mechanism....which we haven't proven is a signalling mechanism, btw.
Keyword searches are not terribly good at proving things.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)"cfDNA has not been shown to affect anything" is not the same as "cfDNA has been shown not to affect anything". Your formulation leaves a lot of room for further research. That's a good thing, right?
"But you can get people excited, and receive more funding, if you throw out GMOs as a boogeyman." You seem to be saying that receiving more funding for molecular biology research is a bad thing. But you can't actually mean that, can you?
I get the distinct impression that you're trying to shut down the discussion. But that can't be true either, can it?
jeff47
(26,549 posts)There's a very long laundry list of things we have not shown to happen. Burn a piece of paper. We have not shown it's impossible for the CO2 to re-form into paper. You gonna expect it to happen? For how long?
Additionally, no one has found any situation where eukaryotes (non-bacteria) can take up foreign DNA on their own. It has to be injected by something else, like a virus or a genetic engineer. That's step one in cfDNA getting expressed and it has never been shown to happen.
It is when you're "research" is about lying.
Just like additional funding for anti-vaxxers is a bad thing. Or additional funding for climate change deniers.
No, I'm attempting to point out that there are people shoveling bullshit that they pretend is science in order to defraud the public.
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)That this is hyperbolic nonsense...
MineralMan
(146,298 posts)is not a scientific article from peer-reviewed journal. Instead, it is just an article published on an advocacy website. While it sort of masquerades as a scientific article, it is not, and ISIS is not a scientific journal at all.
In fact, ISIS is an advocacy organization and nothing published there should be accepted as fact without further review.
Very clever, ISIS, following typical journal article formatting, but nobody should be fooled into thinking that's what this is.
REP
(21,691 posts)In reviewing the organisation, David Colquhoun accused the ISIS of promoting pseudoscience and specifically criticised Ho's understanding of homeopathy.[7]
Ho, together with Joe Cummins of the University of Western Ontario, has argued that a sterility gene engineered into a crop could be transferred to other crops or wild relatives and that "This could severely compromise the agronomic performance of conventional crops and cause wild relatives to go extinct". They argued that this process could also produce genetic instabilities, which might be "leading to catastrophic breakdown", and stated that there are no data to assure that this has not happened or cannot happen.[13] This concern contrasts with the reason why these sterile plants were developed, which was to prevent the transfer of genes to the environment by preventing any plants that are bred with or that receive these genes from reproducing.[14] Indeed, any gene that caused sterility when transferred to a new species would be eliminated by natural selection and could not spread.[15]
Ho has also argued that bacteria could acquire the bacterial gene barnase from transgenic plants. This gene kills any cell that expresses it and lacks barstar, the specific inhibitor of barnase activity. In an article entitled Chronicle of An Ecological Disaster Foretold, which was published in an ISIS newsletter, Ho speculated that if a bacterium acquired the barnase gene and survived, this could make the bacteria a more dangerous pathogen.[16]
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae-Wan_Ho#Institute_of_Science_in_Society
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)yawnmaster
(2,812 posts)As others have stated in this thread, this is not research and is not from a peer reviewed journal and really doesn't given any new information. It just puts information together in a way that is propaganda and hyperbole.
DNA entering a cell, much less eventually getting expressed as a protein is by no means trivial and is near (if not) impossible!
And so easily testable too, with a human cell culture with DNA in the media.
It doesn't happen.
The cell has numerous innate mechanisms preventing this...serious mechanisms.
For instance, how does the DNA get into the nucleus to be transcribed into RNA??
how does it get past the cell membrane?? and these two are mechanical barriers.
There are numerous active barriers.
You can argue GMO and I am all for rational argument, but this is not one of them.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)Abstract
Our previous studies have demonstrated that stable microRNAs (miRNAs) in mammalian serum and plasma are actively secreted from tissues and cells and can serve as a novel class of biomarkers for diseases, and act as signaling molecules in intercellular communication. Here, we report the surprising finding that exogenous plant miRNAs are present in the sera and tissues of various animals and that these exogenous plant miRNAs are primarily acquired orally, through food intake. MIR168a is abundant in rice and is one of the most highly enriched exogenous plant miRNAs in the sera of Chinese subjects. Functional studies in vitro and in vivo demonstrated that MIR168a could bind to the human/mouse low-density lipoprotein receptor adapter protein 1 (LDLRAP1) mRNA, inhibit LDLRAP1 expression in liver, and consequently decrease LDL removal from mouse plasma. These findings demonstrate that exogenous plant miRNAs in food can regulate the expression of target genes in mammals.
CELL RESEARCH: Full Study
On edit: ScienceDaily: ''Plant miRNAs could enter host blood and tissues via food intake, study suggests''
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)And from Nature no less. I wonder if it was peer reviewed? </sarcasm>
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...the GMOers here won't touch it ever since I posted it earlier. They. Have. Nothing.
It destroys all their BS and obfuscation attempts.
- Truth does that to those who live in The Dark......
We don't have to live this way......