Many of my colleagues are trying to improve stress tolerance in stress-sensitive crops through a transgenic approach, because of climate change and the potential to use marginal lands. However, there has been very little progress in the applied aspect of it. We are also involved in a similar project and cloned 25 genes from various sources to test their potential to improve stress tolerance in yeast and Arabidopsis some of them were also transformed in eggplant and in tomato, generated several transgenic lines. Some of these genes have already been shown to confer stress tolerance in various publications, such as NHX1, TRK1, HKT1, etc., however, none of them produced any significant results in our lab. It turns out that stress-mediated reprogramming resulted in draining transgenic plants valuable resources by executing a stress response, even though the transgene imparted stress resistance trait. Our initial data suggests that the use of PGP microbes can improve environmental fitness by overriding the stress-mediated reprograming constraint, thereby suggesting a combined approach might be more practical and applied.
I would like to initiate an interactive discussion in this regard so that we can move this transgenic approach towards practical application.
Rashid Ali
Yet, some GE modified crops were successfully developed for tolerating environmental stresses and went into markets. For example, the DroughtGuardTM maize. DroughtGard maize contains transgenic gene for “cold shock protein B” (cspB) from Bacillis subtilis. Cold shock proteins were discovered (and named) due to their rapid accumulation in cold shocked bacterial cells.
Article Bacterial RNA Chaperones Confer Abiotic Stress Tolerance in ...
GM crops with stress-related genes may, in theory, more often have hazardous characteristics, as similar genes may also be involved in defense systems against, for instance, pests or pathogens in general. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-32423-4_19
Genetic engineering could also create unknown side effects or outcomes. Certain changes in a plant or animal could cause unpredicted allergic reactions in some people which, in its original form, did not occur. Other changes could result into the toxicity of an organism to humans or other organisms. https://www.jbiomeds.com/biomedical-sciences/human-social-and-environmental-impacts-of-human-genetic-engineering.php?aid=7264
Releasing genetically modified plants or crop into the environment may have direct effects, including gene transfer to wild relatives or conventional crops, weediness, trait effects on nontarget species, and other unintended effects https://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2011/369573/
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