Week 2: Reading about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

Welcome back to my blog.



This week I continued reading. I focused on learning more about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). I read Paparini and Romano-Spica’s review, “Public health issues related with the consumption of food obtained from genetically modified organisms” from the Biotechnology annual review [1]. This review discussed the health risks of GMOs by explaining how GMOs are made. The review concluded that one can not make a sweeping generalization about GMOs, as some GMO products may have potential health risks and some may not. The author states that in order to be more certain of the health risks of different GMO products, there should be more testing. In addition, I believe that testing GMO products should be Through this review, I learned more about the mechanisms of GMOs, health risks, and how they are made. This week, I also began reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carlson [2].



This week at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I shadowed Dr. Lindsay’s maize work. On Tuesday we worked on dissecting the maize meristem and used a confocal microscope to take photos of the meristem’s fluorescence to observe if and how two proteins interacted. On Wednesday, we did a TurboID experiment to extract proteins from some maize meristems. Lastly, on Thursday Dr. Lindsay, her mentee, Pan, Dr. Dave Jackson, and I demonstrated leaf infiltration for Genspace’s BioRocket Interns. We used an agrobacterium solution with pRuby (a red protein that is found in beets) to illustrate how you can insert DNA into a plant. If infiltration was successful, in a few days the infiltrated leaves will turn red.



Sources:

1. Paparini, A., & Romano-Spica, V. (2004). Public health issues related with the consumption of food obtained from genetically modified organisms. Biotechnology annual review, 10, 85–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1387-2656(04)10004-5

2. Silent Spring-Rachel Carson-1962 : Free Download, borrow, and streaming. Internet Archive. (n.d.). Retrieved April 6, 2022, from https://archive.org/details/fp_Silent_Spring-Rachel_Carson-1962/page/n11/mode/1up