How is the DNA of a GMO modified?
Modifying the DNA of plants is something farmers have been doing for a long time. When plants were first “domesticated” into agricultural crops, it was because their DNA had been modified over many hundreds of years through traditional processes such as seed selection by farmers, and then later through controlled breeding by scientists called “plant breeders.” The DNA is modified whenever plants reproduce sexually, which mixes the genes of the two parents together in the offspring. By controlling this process of sexual reproduction among plants, over the years, farmers and scientists transformed wild plants into the crop plants grown by farmers today. GMOs take these traditional crop plants one step farther, by making further changes in their DNA using a technique called “genetic engineering,” a technique first developed in 1973. This technique does not rely on sexual reproduction; instead it moves individual genes with desired traits directly from source organisms into the living DNA
