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Expert response from Community Manager
Moderator for GMOAnswers.com
Friday, 22/05/2015 12:35
Yes, there are. There are currently eight crops from GM seeds that are commercially available in the United States: corn (field and sweet), soybeans, cotton, canola, alfalfa, sugar beets, papaya and squash. The USDA just recently approved the commercial planting of genetically engineered nonbrowning Arctic apple and lower-acrylamide forming Simplot potato, but they won’t appear on the market for some time.
As Rod Herman, Biotechnology Regulatory Sciences Group at Dow AgroSciences, highlighted, it is worth noting that:
“Corn has been grown by humans for approximately 10,000 years, and its genetics have been heavily modified through breeding and mutation to improve its utility as a crop over this very long period. The modern technique of transgenesis has been used to further improve the agronomic characteristics of corn over the last two decades. Transgenesis has become synonymous with the term ‘genetically modified’ (GM) over this time period, but it is really a misnomer. So all corn on the planet has been genetically modified by human activities, but not all corn has transgenes inserted by the modern technique of transgenesis.”
