The CIMMYT findings appear to be at odds both with work from Mexican government researchers announced in September and a study published in November 2001 in Nature (414, 541–543). The Mexican government research, which is supported by the National Commission of Biodiversity but which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggested that transgenes are present in creole maize from many sites around Mexico. The Nature paper reported that transgenic DNA constructs—the 35S promoter together with, in two cases, sequences from an alcohol dehydrogenase gene—had been found in a number of creole maize varieties in two remote mountain locations in Mexico. Subsequently, both authors of the paper, David Quist and Ignacio Chapela of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California (Berkeley, CA), were reported widely in the general media, drawing attention to “risks to food security” and threats to “the genetic bank account of diversity.” Environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth took up and amplified the cry, producing calls for moratoria or outright bans on GM crops. They are particularly concerned because Mexico, as the place where the first maize farmers dwelt, is the center of genetic diversity of the crop.
CIMMYT's research was in part a defensive move. The center maintains an extensive maize seedbank and supplies seeds on demand to research institutions and extension services around the developing world. “We needed to be able to reassure our users that transgenes were not running rampant through the seedbank,” says David Hoisington, director of CIMMYT's Applied Biotechnology Center, “and we have shown that.” Their initial results, reported in mid-October (http://www.cimmyt.org/whatiscimmyt/init_test.htm), could not find the 35S promoter in any of 28 maize populations in its seedbank. They looked at 30 plants from each population. In a second phase, the CIMMYT researchers are looking for herbicide-resistance transgenes and, importantly, have started to examine materials that have been collected recently (1999 and 2001) from farmers' fields in Oaxaca, the state where Quist and Chapela collected their materials.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution