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[SANET-MG] human genes in plants produce unexpected side effects



Pharm crop production of human genes and their products presumes that
the human genes have no effect on plant growth. The article below shows
that is very wrong. Constructions such as rice with human lysozyme and
lactoferrin are likely producing hidden impacts on the plants and such
impacts may result in formation of unpredicted toxins to humans. What I
am saying is that greedy academics and corporate public relations people
both promote pharm crops as if they knew everything about the
consequences of their experiments, such approaches are just the lies of
greedy people.
Transgenic Research 00: 1–9, 2004.
In press
Overexpression of human erythropoietin (EPO) affects plant morphologies:
retarded vegetative growth in tobacco and male sterility in tobacco and
Arabidopsis
Ban Yoon Cheon1,y, Hae Jin Kim,y, Kyung Hee Oh, Sung Chu Bahn, Ji Hoon Ahn
Jang Won Choi, Sung Han Ok, Jung Myung Bae & Jeong Sheop Shin,
Abstract
Erythropoietin (EPO) is a glycoprotein used for curing human anemia by
regulating the differentiation
of erythroid progenitors and the production of red blood cells. To
examine the expression of recombi-
nant EPO in plants, pPEV-EP21, in which human epo cDNA under the control
of the CaMV 35S pro-
moter, was introduced into tobacco and Arabidopsis via Agrobacterium
tumefaciens-mediated
transformation. The RNA expression level of epo in the transgenic lines
was initially estimated by
Northern blot analysis. Two transgenic lines, which exhibited a high
expression level of epo mRNA de-
termined by Northern analysis, were chosen for the Western blot analysis
to examine the production of
EPO proteins. Those two lines, EP21-12 and EP21-14, revealed detectable
bands on the immunoblot. In-
terestingly, constitutive expression of the human epo gene affected the
morphologies in transgenic plants
such that vegetative growth of transgenic tobacco was retarded, and male
sterility was induced in trans-
genic tobacco and Arabidopsis.

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