BioCentury
ARTICLE | Regulation

New report weighs risks of recombination in transgenic plants

March 14, 1994 8:00 AM UTC

A published report of viral recombination in an engineered plant does not mean that transgenic, virally resistant plant seeds should be shelved, scientists say. Instead, the research points to ways of predicting that the release of such plants will be safe.

In the experiments reported in Science, Michigan State University researchers engineered nicotiana plants to express the coat protein of the cowpea chloritic mottle virus, missing one-third of its genome at the 3' end. The viral fragment didn't confer viral resistance, but was an artificial construct to study viral recombination. ...