How do GMOs relate to chemistry in everyday life?

Expert response from Kurt Boudonck

Greenhouse Group Leader, BASF

Friday, 02/10/2015 11:35

Chemistry is all around us and is part of our daily life. Chemistry can be thought of as the collection of substances or chemicals that have a defined composition. There are “natural” chemicals produced by nature and there are “synthetic” or “artificial” chemicals made by humans.  

Our human bodies, plants, animals, bacteria and viruses absorb, produce and release thousands of chemicals each day such as water, sugar, cholesterol, vitamins and medicine, resulting in millions of chemical or metabolic reactions in an organism. For example, eating sugar extracted from a sugarcane plant will trigger many chemical reactions in our body: the sugar will get processed, broken down, transported, some will give us energy to run and some will get stored or excreted. 

Whether a human or animal eats a GMO or non-GMO plant, it’s the same concept. As we eat the plant, we ingest thousands of chemicals such as metabolites, proteins, DNA and sugars, which will have responses in our body. Different responses include giving us energy, making us sleepy and providing vitamin C for defense. No two plants we ever eat are exactly the same, just like there are no two humans on the planet who are exactly the same. Every plant we eat provides a different mix of chemicals (food components) entering our bodies.

As part of regulatory and safety studies, GMO producers are required to run tests and submit data that demonstrate substantial equivalence, meaning the GMO plant is substantially equivalent to an already existing non-GMO plant. In other words, the chemical composition of the GMO plant is comparable to the non-GMO variety, except for the new trait that has improved the plant. For example, one can add a building block to a plant that was missing before. The opposite approach that can be achieved with GMOs would be to leave a building block out of the plant that wasn’t that great for the plant or human consumption in the first place. A nice example is the GMO Arctic Apple, where scientists have simply turned off the browning process in the apple, so they don’t turn brown after bruising. 

When we are referring to the alterations made to a plant at the molecular/DNA/metabolic/chemical level, GMO plants change little to the chemistry of everyday life. In comparison with natural breeding (non-GMO plants naturally breeding in the wild and each time exchanging 50 percent of its DNA with its mate), the impact of GMOs is very little since most of the time, we only add or delete one gene. So compared to the natural reproductive process in plants where thousands of genes get exchanged to the progeny, GMOs result in far less change to a plant in terms of number of genes. To summarize how GMOs relate to chemistry in everyday life, my perspective is that there is  little impact on the chemicals being made inside the plant, but a beneficial impact to farmers, consumers and the environment.