Culinary delights

Giving the public what it wants might be one way of winning greater public acceptance of biotech foods. That's what two groups of researchers are doing in the U.K. and Australia. Oxford University researchers are working on a project that could yield lower fat French fries, while the Australian team has succeeded in mapping the prawn genome, paving the way to putting bigger prawns on the barbie.

Oxford scientists have discovered a way to increase the starch content of crops such as potato, maize and rice: suppression of the NAD-malic enzyme can have a dramatic impact on starch yields. When the gene coding for the enzyme is switched off, starch accumulation increases...