Off Patent GMO traits

[Dusty]

Anyone working specifically on NK 603?

[William Schlegel]

In my view, even off patent GMO traits are incompatible with the idea of open-source plant breeding which to a large extent exists to provide the organic farming and gardening movement a source of trustworthy and patent free varieties. I personally hope that I am breeding for organics- so no I would not work with an off-patent GMO.

[Steph S]

Since NK603 is just making the corn compatible with the glyphosate herbicide they want to sell you...  you may as well be working for the glyphosate sellers, if you used the gene in your corn. 

[Dale Wilson]

Steph,
I think you and William are being a bit unfair to Dusty, and to GMO traits that have entered the public domain.  Many of these are useful.  That is why they have been so popular.  Maybe we should be less ideological about such things.
Dale

[Tim DH]

Hi Dale,
     Which GMO traits that have entered the public domain do you think are useful? The one discussed above is useless to me as I would never consider applying Glyphosate to my land.

Tim DH

[Steph S]

Hi Dale,

I was watching a video the other night about large scale farming of corn and soy in the US, which mentioned that corn in particular is rarely a food crop for humans, lots of it is grown for eg biofuel production.  So I can understand how a farmer at that scale who is squeezed for expensive inputs, would see the roundup resistance gene as a way to produce his own seed, save on cost, and continue farming in the same way with the rest of the package.
The savings potential is maybe small, considering the long and winding road of breeding a stable OP, with all the variable results that produces. You could possibly make a quick save by using your newly crossed material as crop seed, but you would stand to lose a lot of production, if the newly bred corn didn't stack up for yield or other key traits.  You wouldn't likely get a uniform stand in any generation F2 to F6 or 7, which would not work well with the harvesters. So when you make the investment of time and effort required to breed a primo roundup ready OP variety, the amount actually saved may not be worth the cost.  That's especially so where you're breeding something tailored to a system with other costly inputs built into it, such as the herbicide, pesticide, ferts etc.  I think an OP breeding project might only come out on the right side of the ledger if it reduced more of those dependencies on Big Ag.
The gene is probably only available in the F1 varieties sold by the company, so you would have to dehybridize and select for the gene to get an OP parent for producing F1 seed. Six or seven years of time and space for that, there's no quick savings to be had.  And F1 seed production is costly at best.  It would be a business to produce seed for even one giant farm, and it may even cost more than the big guys are doing at scale.

Either way, did not intend to be unfair to Dusty.

He did ask if anyone was working on it, but the active participants here are mostly food breeders for organic systems as William commented.

[reed]

I'm not sure of the OSSI stance on GMO but since the creators of GMO are pretty much one and the same as those who seek to own and control everything, I suspect that it is frowned on. I don't buy or use plant killing chemicals, so I have no use for it.

Even if NK603 had other great traits, like fast maturity, stalk strength or something else, I still would not what it mixed into my corn.

[Dale Wilson]

Larry and I are trying hard to avoid contamination by transgenic corn in the tortilla corn project because many potential users of our germplasm do not want that.  But personally, I don't mind eating transgenic crops.  Also, I spend a LOT of time hoeing and mulching so I understand the value of herbicides.  I have grown glyphosate resistant sweet corn in the past, and it made weed control much easier. Also, insect resistant Bt-derived transgenics are obviously very useful in corn.  But the big force in modern breeding that produces extreme concentration of the industry is genomic selection (marker-assisted selection).  Almost nobody has the wherewithal to compete in that arena.  Bayer and especially Corteva (Pioneer) are making corn hybrids that *routinely* exceed 300 bu/a in heavy midwest soils.  It's a shame we won't ever get to use those inbreds, since the PVP system has been supplanted by utility patents. BTW, one CAN get LH287 from the USDA, a superb inbred by Terry Foley (Monsanto) which has seen continued importance in the industry after all these years.  Is anybody here is using LH287 as a genetic source?  I got ahold of some 287 and crossed it with giant OP Southern dent corn a few weeks ago. Can't wait to see what that family looks like (hopefully shorter!)
Dale   

[Ohio Alex]

I wonder if this could be used as a possible open source selectable marker for at home transgenics. Shuttle vectors with homologous repeats that match the roundup ready sequence could flank a gene of interest. If the vector properly integrated itself, the use of a dab of glyphosate can be used as a selectable marker; no damage to a leaf would mean no insertion while herbicide damage would mean the plant carries the gene of interest.