What are GE foods?
GE foods are those including ingredients made using techniques in which scientists insert genes into an organism’s DNA. [1] Genes are templates that cells use in creating proteins, which determine many of an organism’s characteristics. Changing an organism’s genes therefore can cause its cells to make novel proteins, causing it to exhibit a new trait. For example, a gene conferring cold resistance in fish can make a tomato plant create proteins which similarly give it greater resistance to cold. GE versus traditional breeding Traditional breeding is another way of getting genes into an organism to cause it to exhibit a new trait. Although the biotechnology industry would have you believe that GE is just like traditional breeding, it is radically different. In traditional breeding, members of the same, or very similar, species are crossed to create offspring with some novel trait. This greatly limits the genes that can be combined. Furthermore, when different but similar species are cro
