Biology 1002B Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Aquadvantage Salmon, Cauliflower Mosaic Virus, Chinook Salmon
29 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
GMO Regulations in Canada
• Organizations that are responsible for approving GMOs
o Health Canada
o Agriculture and Agri-food Canada
o Environment Canada
• Health Canada defines a GM food as "one derived from an organism that has had some of
its heritable traits changed, and this can involve traditional techniques of cross breeding,
chemical radiation or mutagenesis, recombinant DNA (genetic engineering) techniques"
• This means ALL food is genetically modified!!
• GM food in Canada
o Primarily crop plants: corn, soybean, canola, sugar beet GROWN IN CANADA
• Traits are pest or herbicide resistant
• Primarily used in processed foods
o Squash, alfalfa, papaya, cotton IMPORTED
Arctic Apples
• GMO trait is a consumer quality
• Polyphenol oxidase gene (browning) is silenced by RNAi (miRNA) from inserted apple
genes
• Can grow a whole plant from a single cell, so transforming a single leave cell can grow a
whole apple tree
• Use vector derived from Ti plasmid of Rhizobium and insert into apple leaves
o Use kanamycin resistance as selectable marker
o mRNA from plasmid act as RNAi that knocks down normal expression
o Use CMV (cauliflower mosaic virus) promoter which is very powerful
• Approved for sale in US and Canada
o Kanamycin resistance is everywhere
o Plant viruses will not kill you
o No new proteins in apples - in fact there is one less, so that it does not turn brown
AquAdvantage Salmon
• First GMO animal approved by Canada for human consumption
• Put eggs under pressure and they become polyploid
o Triploid, all female Atlantic salmon
• Use pUC18 bacterial plasmid as vector (old-school bacterial vector)
o Take growth hormone gene from Chinook Salmon, but growth hormone is naturally
cyclical and turn on only at certain times of the year
o Use ocean pout antifreeze gene promoter
o Use ocean pout antifreeze terminator region
• Transgenic fish grow twice as fast - NOT twice the size!! They reach adult size faster
Animal mediated pharmaceuticals
• Transgenic goats
• Human antithrombin gene
Genetically Modified Humans?
• Some isolated successes in "gene therapy", several failures
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
