Andrew Weil, his woo, and anti-GMO hysteria...

[roseBudd]

130. As opposed to Mother Jones & Huffington Post

Mary is a genomics scientist, with credentials in microbiology, immunology, plant cell biology, and mammalian cell, developmental, and molecular biology (PhD). All comments here are my own, and do not represent my company or any other company.

http://www.biofortified.org/2013/05/gmo-wheat-and-shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/

I know my way around bioinformatics – in fact I teach it to others. So let’s take a brief trip through the DNA sequences in question to see what was really wrong about the Safe Food Foundation report. The concern they express, resurrected here, is that double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) produced by RNAi silencing in GE crops could silence our own genes if we eat them. The mechanism is complicated, but in short, before there can be any silencing there needs to be a sequence match between the dsRNA produced by these plants and the DNA of our own genes. Heinemann claimed that he found these sequence matches – but as I will demonstrate he didn’t find anything of the sort.

The claims Heinemann made were based on a sequence that was 25,187 bases long. In no way that was the appropriate sequence to use for the analysis. It was like throwing 25,000 strands of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. There were going to be false positives. And one of the pasta pieces that stuck was to the GBE human gene. This was the basis for the claims made by Judy Carman in her SFF report that provided the dire warning about how this wheat would kill your babies.

Within the large record, only a small portion represents the SBE1 gene. See the long image on the right. And even within the actual gene part of that record, only a fraction of that sequence would be in the constructs used. The key point to be made about this was that their analysis was pointless and wrong.

I learned from Orac’s piece that there had been an update to the analysis, though. Heinemann had apparently realized that the sequence he used was probably incorrect. (Yes, we here at Biofortified had spotted that immediately.) There’s a re-analysis with a different sequence that you can now examine.

The new sequence? Oh, it’s different, yeah. It’s found within this GenBank record. But it’s not even the whole record. It’s only bases 96-635. That’s right–540 bases, not 25 thousand. Mm hmm. In case you are curious, 25,187 / 540 = more than 45x too much sequence. That’s a lot of pasta.

So there’s less spaghetti now. But again, Jack is able to deliver some sticking to the wall. However, all of the matches he highlights are either to introns – which would not matter for the mechanism of action that is the issue here. Or they are in the genome desert areas, thousands of bases away from anything that appears to be a gene.

Result: Take a deep breath. The GMO wheat that forms the basis of this claim will not kill your children or permanently alter your genome.