Frankenwheat: A New Hope for World Hunger

There's a new hope for the 1 billion people who go to sleep hungry every night. On Friday, a team of British scientists announced they had cracked the genome of wheat, the third most-produced cereal in the world after corn and rice, opening the door for the creation of more productive and nutritious varieties.

"The information we have collected will be invaluable in tackling the problem of global food shortage," University of Liverpool Professor Neil Hall said in a press release.

Five times longer than the human genome, which was fully sequenced 10 years ago, the wheat genome is the latest of the world's big crops to be cracked. Rice was fully sequenced in 2005, corn in 2009 and soybeans earlier this year.

The particular variety cracked by the British team is one called Chinese Spring. Its sequence, which will be made available to the public at The EMBL Genetic Database, will be used by scientists across the globe to better understand the crop and determine how to improve it.

Scientists have been genetically modifying (GM) crops by manipulating or inserting foreign DNA into plants for decades. The first ever, commercially grown GM food was a variety of tomato called FlavrSavr that hit US markets in 1994. Its DNA sequence was modified to carry a foreign gene that prevents the tomato from softening after harvest. Dozens of other crops have since been modified and thrown into the food supply unlabeled, stealthily reducing worldwide pesticide use, increasing yields and bolstering the nutritional value of many modified crops.

Golden Rice, a GM crop developed by the Swiss over the past decade, carries up to 23 times the beta-carotene of comparable natural varieties. So far, GM opponents have kept the rice off the market, arguing its acceptance could open the floodgates to a future where all crops are "Frankenfoods."

But many see hope in genetic modification at a time when the world is hungrier than ever.

"It is predicted that within the next 40 years world food production will need to be increased by 50 per cent," Hall writes. "Developing new, low input, high yielding varieties of wheat will be fundamental to meeting these goals."

Photo by United States Dept. of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons.