
Healthy Eating Support Group
This community is a forum for people who are determined to improve their eating habits for health, personal wellness and other reasons. What you eat can have a dramatic impact on your life expectancy, your mood, your physical and mental well-being and much more. Share your experience eating healthy, get advice and find others who have similar goals.
The genetic code is so universal...just 4 basic molecules strung together into a pattern.
You've got a string of molecules that looks like this:
aggtaattccctctgaattaggcctaagt
and lets say.. those molecules in that order encode a protein that makes cells frost resistant. There's nothing inately "fishy" about that molecule.. it's just a protein that confers some cold-protection to the cell. there are already plenty or proteins that the fish and tomato have in common, plenty of genes that are already present in both. If they are able to take that string of molecules, in that order, and have the tomato able to produce that protein which will then protect the tomato cells against frost.. why not?
It's much more efficient than scanning the world for a tomato that has already mutated in such a way that its cells are protected against frost and then attempting to cross breed that mutant plant in a way that would preserve the frost-resistant characteristic... but the result would be the same.
it's just a less expensive and time consuming way to do it.
instead of having to rely on trial and error and hoping that the frost-resistant gene gets passed onto the next generation.. we can take that gene and just put it right where we want it and see if it works in the tomato! (yes, from a fish, but man.. DNA is all really really really really really similar when you get it down to just the DNA. at my work, we have a DNA synthesizer where i can type a genetic code into the computer and run the machine and out comes a bottle of DNA suspended in chemicals with the exact code that i have typed in. we could create the salmon frost-resistant gene without having salmon involved at all!)
It's all just strands of molecules that prompt the cell (whatever cell the DNA is in) to create a protein and then that protein has some activity in the cell. it's cool stuff :)
LOL! I am happy to see I am not the only concerned consumer!
I try to by my seeds locally....have not done so last year as I planted no garden.....I will message you the Woman I had boughten from (seeds)and you can e mail her k?
Sherose