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[SANET-MG] facts on flax



nature biotechnology july 2004
Facts on Flax
Your editorial 'Drugs in crops—the unpalatable truth' (Nat. Biotechnol.
22, 133, 2004) was timely and important, but ends with the terrible
proposal "Let's grow pharma plants, but let those plants be Arabidopsis,
or flax, or duckweed." The tiny mustard plant, Arabidopsis, might work
in very small farms and duckweed may not be all wet, but flax is an
abominable suggestion.

Flax is grown extensively in Canada and the United States for fiber
(linen), oil (linseed) and animal feed. The crop is both inbreeding and
insect pollinated1 meaning that the transgenes from pharma crops could
easily pollinate the common weedy relatives of flax along with the very
common feral weeds of the crop plant2. One transgenic
herbicide-resistant form of flax has been approved for commercial
production2. Flax is therefore not a good candidate for pharma crops
because it is known to be insect pollinated, allowing the pharma
transgenes to spread to commercial crops used in human foods, such as
salad dressing and in animal feed cake along with industrial oil and fiber.


REFERENCES
McGregor, S. Insect Pollination of Cultivated Crop Plants. (US
Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, USA, 1976).
http://gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/book/chap9/flax.html
US Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
Fed. Reg. 64, 28794--29795 (1999).
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/brs/aphisdocs2/98_33501p_com.pdf
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