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Upgrading Plant Proteins
| Article
# : |
20713 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,895 Words |
| Author
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Jesse M. Jaynes
Jesse M. Jaynes is associate professor of biochemistry at
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and holds a joint
appointment with the Louisiana State Agricultural Experiment
Station. |
Potatoes in Ireland and chickens in Maryland both are evidence of human prowess at manipulating the genes of biological species through controlled-breeding techniques that have been improved gradually over thousands of years. Plants and animals have been bred to maximize their food yield, and remarkable advances have been made.
Yet maximizing the yield of plants fails to address the quality of the food produced. In parts of central Africa, for several months each year, the sole primary food available is the cassava root. No animals are to be found, and the people, especially children, suffer not just from a lack of food but from a lack of few key building blocks of dietary proteins.
Although some researchers have attempted to breed plants that contain a better balance of the key protein building blocks, progress has been slow. Malnutrition due to poor-quality food is an increasingly severe world problem.
In 1953, when the DNA molecule was shown to be the language of heredity, scientists could begin to conceive of a radically different approach to changing the characteristics of biological species: by changing their genetic material. These visionary ideas began to take on substance in the early 1970s through experiments that illuminated the possibilities of manipulating the genetic "tablet of life" in the laboratory. For the first time in history, people were not limited to the traditional breeding of domesticated plants and animals. Direct intervention, at the molecular level, into the evolutionary processes of living things was now possible. Further improvement of these techniques provides the opportunity to construct genetic combinations impossible to achieve by conventional means.
Recent advances in genetic engineering now make it possible to tailor specific protein it possible to tailor specific protein molecules to meet the nutritional needs of humans. All the technology is available for introducing genes encoding these tailor-made proteins into the major food crops in order to over come their inherent nutritional deficiencies, especially their deficiencies in a few key building blocks of protein.
The thousands of protein molecules, which constitute about 15 percent of human body weight, are made from diverse combinations of 20 building blocks, called amino acids. Of these the body can make 12, but a minimum amount of the other 8 amino acids must be ingested daily for optimum health. Milk, eggs, and meat contain
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