Davao City, The Philippines
February 26, 2009
by Manuel T. Cayon,
BusinessMirror via
SEAMEO SEARCA
Three modified crops, including
rice, resistant to common pests will hit the domestic market in
the next three years.
Other biotech crops are being tested in the Mindanao campus of
the University of the Philippines (UP).
“These are the things that we can expect in the field of
biotechnology in the Philippines,” said Dr. Eufemio Rasco, a
Cornell University-schooled plant breeder, in a presentation
before agriculture scientists and experts and students at UP
Mindanao here.
Rasco foresees the Philippines in a leading role in the
application of traditional biotechnology using new materials. He
said the domestic market would see the commercial production of
a variety of Khak Nuan papaya, genetically modified (GM)
to resist the common pest ringspot, as well as an eggplant
variety modified to resist fruit and shoot borers, and the GM
rice called Golden Rice.
He said the modified crops would add to the four already in the
market, the controversial Bt corn, soybeans, cotton and canola.
“We can expect these three modified products to be commercially
produced in the next three years,” said Rasco, a professor of
plant breeding at UP Mindanao.
He said the private sector is “also talking about its own
multiple stacked genes in corn, about eight of them,” despite
the controversy generated by its well-publicized experiments in
Tampakan, South Cotabato, in 2002.
In UP here, Rasco has led the field experiments in sago, which
has multiple uses in food production, and the pitcher plant,
eyed mainly for its ornamental use. He said the experiments have
been done in the last 12 years.
From sago, a kind of palm, starch could be derived as flour
substitute in baking and other industrial uses, and lactic acid.
The pitcher plant, growing well in the northern hinterland of
this city, has its leaves forming like a pitcher.
He said he is also experimenting on a plant called nepenthes,
which exhibits the unique characteristic of being a cross
between a plant and an animal. “It grows like other plants would
but it also feeds on other plants, a different kind of
‘plant-animal’ hybrid,” he said.
The plant could become a new platform for genetic engineering.
“We may hijack its own sap to determine why it eats on other
plants, while growing as a plant,” Rasco explained.
Nepenthes is an ornamental plant, “and biotechnology could help
save this plant—endemic in the Philippines—from extinction.”
“Yes, this is an endangered species,” he said.
“These are our achievements in plant biotechnology: seed
propagation media, hydropriming biology of flowering and seed
production, in-vitro cutting propagation, callus and
regeneration, plant growing media, acclimatization, selling of
in-vitro seedlings and selling of clones,” he added.
Contrary to common perceptions, however, “what we are using here
in the Philippines is still the traditional kind of
biotechnology, but we are using new materials,” Rasco added.
“It’s an impression that we are using modern biotechnology,” he
said.
In developed economies, scientists use gene-splicing, or genetic
engineering and protoplast fusion, or, “in general, any
technique that forces unnatural or horizontal DNA transfer.”
Although modern technology also “uses DNA markers to establish
paternity, solve crimes and diagnose diseases, plant breeding
and studying evolution still [are a] part of traditional
biotechnology,” according to Rasco.
“Currently, traditional biotechnology dominates, contrary to
what is being impressed on the public,” Rasco explained.
“Application of modern biotechnology is still limited; in a crop
agriculture, for instance, out of about 250,000 plant species,
only four major crops were subject to genetic modification:
corn, cotton, soybeans and canola.”
He said current uses of traditional biotechnology are in food
processing and production, biomedical applications such as drugs
and vaccines, and in industrial applications such as cleaning
agents.
“The oldest is food processing and food production, and, would
you believe, wine is the first product and the microorganisms
are the first workhorses,” he added.
“Mind you, but we can be leaders in the world of traditional
biotechnology using new materials,” he said. “We can only be
followers in modern biotechnology.” |
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