Abstract
The use of genetically modified food (GM food) is a common commodity in the modern world. There is often debate on the safety and labelling of these food items but how much do consumers actually know and are the views of consumers regarding the labelling of these food items? Our study provides new insights on the understanding of Singaporeans regarding the safety of consuming GM food, revealing a major lack of education amongst many Singaporeans in the understanding of what GM food is and its safety. Our findings give us the opportunity and knowledge to further improve and make decisions for creating public policies and education on GM food.
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The MinION Nanopore sequencerMany of us has heard of DNA sequencing and many news and journalism sites often brag about the use of DNA sequencing as an extremely robust and advanced technique. That is true but it is also very accessible compared to a decade ago. “The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome,” National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). [Online]. Available: https://www.genome.gov/27565109/the-cost-of-sequencing-a-human-genome/. [Accessed: 23-Jun-2018]. Sequencing technology has advanced so far that prices has dropped from almost $10,000 per megabase to less than a dollar per megabase. The graph above shows the rapid rate of increasing affordability of DNA sequencing, dropping by half almost every year. I have been lucky enough to have hands-on experience with the MinION and I'm here to share my experience with it. The general pipeline of using the sequencer is as follows: Extraction of Genomic DNA (gDNA) -> Library prep -> Loading of DNA samples into the MinION flow cell -> Sequence analysis. gDNA is routinely prepped via kits such as the Qiagen gDNA extraction kit but needs to be prepped by a library kit by Oxford Nanopore Technologies. The prepared sample is then loaded into the sequencer's flow cell and the sequencing is ran on the MinKNOW program. Simple as that! DNA bases are moved through a nuclear pore that is usually used in nature to move DNA in and out of he nucleus of a cell and what is unique about this is that this pore has been modified to be able to change the current that corresponds to the DNA bases: A, T, G and C. This allows us to do sequencing according to the current recorded. What so revolutionary is the size of a DNA sequencer. Unlike the huge conventional sequencers like Illumina, the sequencer, about 9 inches, is small enough to be bought out to field for DNA sequencing, assuming the necessary equipment is available. This means that, with the proper training and equipment, clinics and hospitals may be able to bring this technology to the general public for precision and personalized medication.
The real work comes from the downstream processing of the data you get from the sequencer which may require a bioinformatician to analyze the data. In 50 years when such analysis is a common skill and this technology is cheap enough for clinicians, this can be a real game-changer to diagnosis for illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and many others. (Photo credits: The New Yorker) Everyone knows bacteria are small microscopic organisms millions of times smaller than us. They can be helpful or harmful to us and they are everywhere. So have you ever wondered how such a tiny little thing can cause us to get sick or even cause death to some? Many think of bacteria as these simple small organisms that are incapable of communication and all do their own thing. This however is very wrong. Think about it like in society, no one person can achieve a giant feat by themselves. And in the case of the bacteria, no one bacteria can conquer a human millions of times larger than them by themselves. So now the most logical deduction is that bacteria work together to conquer this feat. We all know that bacteria can multiply really quickly, hence easily achieving large numbers. But if bacteria can't tell each other what to do, how do they achieve this? Well bacteria achieve this via a system known as quorum sensing (QS). QS is a system that only activates at high cell density; when there are a lot of bacteria. This is how bacteria can tell how many of themselves are there, or at least when there are many copies of itself around. This is why we call it the social media platform of bacteria. So when there are enough copies of themselves, the bacteria are now able to conduct a single activity using a collective effort such as causing disease in a human. I'm sure we are all relatively familiar with hormones, the chemical signals that sends messages to various parts of the body we all learnt in high school biology. Well bacteria don't exactly use hormones, but it is a similar system. Now this system is different in the two classifications of bacteria, Gram-negative(GM-) bacteria and Gram-positive(GM+) bacteria. We are going to talk about GM- bacteria first as it is a simpler system. Just like in a endocrine system(hormones system), chemical signals are produced to talk to one another. Here we see a diagram of how QS works essentially in GM- bacteria. Now don't be afraid of the complexity, it is actually a rather simple system. First let us identify the legend of the system. The red quarters are the chemical signals, the autoinducers. The yellow fractions of circles are the receptors. The autoinducers are able to be read by the receptors and the receptors is what tells the cell what the chemical signal means.
So now looking at the figure for low cell density, we can see that there are very little autoinducers visible. This is because the cell is alone, hence the amount of autoinducers produced in the environment is very little. This is similar to Facebook. When having a small social circle, the number of "likes" you get on your posts is small. The opposite is true when having a large online social circle. This is the basis of QS and is what is happening here in this diagram. Now looking at this analogy, look at the figure for high cell density. This cell is now not alone,many other cells are present. This allows for many more autoinducers to be produced in the surroundings, allow the recptors to pick this up, allowing the cell to realise it has many "likes on its posts". This allows the receptors to do its second function. This allows the receptors to activate genes to produce certain proteins. Now the bacteria is able to produce these genes activated by the receptor. This, when conducted by harmful disease-causing bacteria, is the cause for bacteria making harmful toxins in our body. And this is how this large social network of microorganisms can cause disease or a large orchestrated activity.
(Photo credit: Nubites)
GM food, otherwise known as genetically modified food, some say it's safe, some say it's hazardous. Mysterious to many and a staple to others. Supposedly highly sought after by farmers. So what really is GM food? Does GM food harm or help people?
Well let us speak about what GM food is and how it's made. GM foods are food products genetically modified to have certain traits. An example of such a food is seedless grapes, for the convenience of people who do not wish to deal with the numerous seeds from the grapes. So as we can tell, these traits differ from what is the norm of these food products when found in nature. Most people think that only food products from plant sources can be genetically modified, however this is very incorrect. Meats are most likely genetically modified. Such as in salmon that are modified to be larger and stronger than usual in the wild to increase yield of salmon products in aquaculture. It sounds extremely profitable to farmers to have a improved version of everything right? Well GM food does have its drawbacks to farmers as well. Notice how GM food, especially plant products, are significantly more pricey than normal products? Well this is because companies selling seeds of GM food tend to disallow reproduction of the plant. This is for the need of farmers to constantly buy seeds so that the company earns more profit. So what good has GM food brought to humans? Well there is a famous example that testifies the power of GM food and that is the Golden Rice Project ran by the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board. Golden rice is a genetically modified version of rice that, as the name suggests, is gold in colour and is packed full of Vitamin-A. The Golden Rice Project was originally started to combat night-blindness, a Vitamin-A deficiency, commonly occurring amongst less developed countries where access to fresh and nutritious food is scarce. With golden rice, this staple food satisfies the necessary Vitamin-A daily intake and has been a phenomenal innovation by the biotech industry and prevents about a third of all under-five deaths, which amounts to up to 2.7 million children that could be saved from dying unnecessarily. Now time to answer the question that everyone wants to know, is GM food harmful or not? Well the answer is yes and no. Towards us humans, GM food is generally safe and is approved by the FDA ( Food and Drug Administration). In some rare cases, some people may develop certain allergies. Towards the environment however, GM Food is extremely harmful. Genetically modified plants such as pest resistant vegetables can cause the decline of certain pests in an area. This doesn't sound so bad, heck it even sounds great. However, this is extremely bad to the environment. Some predators may rely heavily on this pest and killing it off may destroy the balance in the ecosystem. A simple example of this can be represented in a simple food chain as represented below. Maize/Corn -> Corn Borer (Maize-eating worm) -> Birds Now to put it simply, the bird populations will dwindle down. Why? Well the birds rely on the corn borers for food but when GM Corn is introduced, the corn will contain Bt proteins, a toxin to the corn borer, hence killing the corn borer, reducing the amount of food sources for the birds. Another problem is the possibility of the corn borers gaining a resistance against Bt, hence giving rise to a generation of unstoppable corn borers. Now let us look at the same food chain that is slightly different. Maize/Corn (Nectar) -> Monarch Butterfly Now this is where it gets interesting. Some of ya'll may think so what? This isn't affecting humans. Well it does here. With the nectar of the maize now being toxic to the butterfly, the maize will not be able to be pollinate. You see, as the butterfly goes on the flower of the maize to drink nectar, the pollen falls on the butterfly. As the butterfly travels to other maize flowers, the pollen from the butterfly falls onto the new flower. This is known as cross-pollination. Without pollination, the flowers will never be able to turn into corns which are the crops we humans want. Maize being a staple to most countries of the US, GM crops may destroy the US food export economy and food supply of maize. This is just one of the many examples of GM crops and its impact on the environment, many more examples are out there. From this all, we can conclude that GM food has no harm onto humans, in fact it has brought us alot of good. GM food however, harms the environment and can cause a lack of biodiversity. Now it's up to you to decide if you support GM food or not. (Photo credits: BBC.com) When we think of clean energy we think of solar and wind. When we think of fuel we think of oil and gas. But what about clean fuel? Perhaps some of you can name me biofuel. Biofuel is fuel derived from plant matter such as palm and sugar cane. But what if I tell you, the unwanted algae you try so hard to scrub off every week in your fish tank is a blooming industry in the biofuel department and is gaining popularity.
(Photo credits: theconfluencecast.com) Coffee is not just an addiction, it's a way of life to most. Coffee is a staple to the mornings of the people who enjoy it and nothing does better than coffee to wake up anyone. Coffee farming has been a multi-billionaire business and it's fueled by the millions of coffee drinkers in the world. Cafes like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts run close to solely on coffee and has made large success with their coffee chains, testifying the significance of the presence of coffee in our global economy. Yet, the economy for coffee is dropping and the profits from the agricultural business for coffee is dropping steadily. This begs the question of why? Why would such a stable and profitable business suddenly be failing in the pass few years?
Well the root of the issue is back into the soil; agriculture of coffee plants has become more and more difficult for the many farmers looking for a profit from this business. Scientists say half of the world's coffee would be wiped out by 2050 by an infectious fungus spreading spreading in tropical countries. This fungus is the coffee leaf rust. This fungal infection was so bad in the past it forced many to switch and grow tea. Another reason for the difficulty of growing coffee now is climate change and global warming. As the precipitation increases in tropical climate, the rate of fungal spreading increases. Coffee plants grow well in about a temperature of 64°–70°F /18°C–21°C. However average temperatures in Brazil, the largest exporter of coffee, has average temperatures of 73°F to 81 °F /23°C to 27 °C in coastal areas and a highest of 100°F /38°C in mainland areas. This is way above the optimal range for coffee, bringing coffee growing to its decline. All of these issues forced the farmers to change the species of coffee plants they grow. There are 2 main coffee plants grown; Robusta and Arabica. Arabica is more susceptible to disease but yields high quality sweet coffee fruits sold at about $1.60/lb while the Robusta variant is more hardy but yields a lower quality bitter coffee, sold at about $0.85/lb. Farmers are now all switching to Robusta, lowering total profit to ensure a sustainable yield. Soon. no farmers would want to grow Arabica, leaving the world with low quality coffee and, maybe, even switch to tea, reducing the total coffee output in the world. As coffee becomes harder to grow, it becomes more expensive for anyone to have a cup of coffee every morning. For the coffee farmers, life becomes harder and a crop that had once helped them may not be a loss in profit. Very soon, a coffee a morning may be a thing of the past and cafes may be forced to shut down. The way of life of almost half of all Americans and many more in the world may just come to a complete halt due to climate change and if we do not do our best to combat global warming, it'll be gone in a blink of an eye. If this doesn't motivate you to help conserve the environment, the drink motivating you every morning will no longer be around. Great white shark (Photo credits: BBC.com) I'm sure you've ever walked into a Chinese restaurant and see a peculiar dish when looking through the menu; Shark Fin Soup. But you probably brushed off the item due to the ridiculous price, or if you did order it, end up with this beautiful broth topped with this translucent bland lackluster flop of fin on it. Now you start to wonder to yourself, why in god gracious heck is this bland and tasteless fin worth so much money? Well this is due to Chinese tradition. It is considered by Chinese as one of the eight treasured foods from the sea. Shark fin soup held a symbolic significance to the Chinese, being served usually only at special occasions such as weddings, banquets, and important business deals. It symbolizes wealth, power, prestige, and honor as well as a symbol of respect and appreciation to the guests. How exactly is shark's fin obtained though? The unknowing sharks are caught and dragged on board the boat, finned mercilessly as it suffocates and thrown back into the ocean alive but fin-less, unable to swim, eat and struggle as it meets its demise. Sharks are caught and finned indiscriminately, regardless of size, age and species, sharks are reeled in for cold cash. In my opinion, there is no better way show the cruelty of this process than by images of the process. Its a painful and grim sight to see. Some wonder how a simple tradition can end up fueling the endangerment of these ancient creatures, surviving mass extinctions and harsh environments, only to be backed to the verge of extinction by humans. Not so scary now huh? The fearsome apex predator, being hunted by our kind no less. The weakest of all animals with no claws or talons, only selfishness, that is the human race.
Chinese cooking has always been known for its use of everything of the source, from the meat of the chicken down to the bones, close to everything is used. Yet, in the cooking of shark's fin soup, only the fin of the shark is used. From the mind-boggling 650 USD / Kg for the fins to a measly 2 USD / Kg for the sharks meat. The shark's body isn't even worth hauling back, being worth less than any old flounder would be. By now, you've seen images you'd only thought you would see in hell and yet here it is, cold hard reality. You must be thinking how to help? How to stop this madness? The most direct and simple way is to stop eating shark's fin soup and spread the message to your friends and family and urge them all to do the same. Next, there are many organizations and movements aiming to stop this. To name a few, www.stopsharkfinning.net and www.defenders.org/sharks/stop-shark-finning. I highly recommend checking them out. As humans, we have a responsibility to stop this act of animal cruelty and I highly urge you to spread the awareness and join the movement especially this Chinese New Year, when shark's fin soup is at its peak of sales. (Photo credits: Wonderfest.org) I'm sure most of you have seen a Jurassic Park movie, or at least know the plot of it; collecting dinosaur DNA from fossils and editing the code into the DNA of existing animals to lay dinosaur eggs and use this to form a giant prehistoric amusement park! Sounds amazing doesn't it? Well unfortunately it's not as simple as that.
Well to simply put it, unfortunately it is impossible to revive dinosaurs because first, DNA has a half-life of 521 years and that's way before biology was even a thing people knew about. Second of all, even if we had dino DNA, it is impossible to put a whole genome into another animal's genome and have a dinosaur offspring be born. Yet, Jurassic Park was a movie that did inspire genetic modification which is now widely used in research now. So how exactly does it work? Now note that there are many ethical debates about how ethical it is to edit an organism and play god but today we are only going to discuss how it is done. Well first we need the locus(specific location of a gene) that we want, and we need to ''cut'' this gene out. To do this we need restriction enzymes that are specific to this locus. With the work of restriction enzymes, we have the isolated gene(s) we want. Next we need a medium to put the genes in. Most of the time genes are put into bacteria to makes certain proteins we want such as insulin for diabetics. But since we are looking at how to edit an organism, we need to edit or replace the genes in a genome of the organism. So first we require special nucleases, enzymes that break up nucleotides. This will allow us to cut up any area we want in the DNA. Now we need to put the genes we want in the cut we made. Using DNA ligase, an enzymes that acts like glue, we can stick the genes we want into the organism's genome. Now note the genes we have taken are single stranded while the DNA is double stranded. So to complete the sequence, we need to use reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that works like a copy machine, this allows us to finish up the DNA sequence to make complementary DNA. Now the sequence editing is complete. It is a long confusing process but if you want to know how to do genetic engineering, this is the basics of it! Total annual waste of Silo Cafe, Melbourne, Australia (Photo credits: BBC.com) There has been a recent rising popularity about stories of people who live a Zero-Trash life, covered by media outlets like Buzzfeed and seeker stories. In most cases we see houses with very "Asian" family stereotypes and the super amazing "one jam jar = the total amount of trash in a year". Perhaps at some point you have thought to try a Zero-Trash life. So what are the benefits of and how to live a Zero-Trash life? One of the biggest ways to live a Zero-Trash life is staring right at your face; follow the 3 Rs, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Reusing is basically the most essential to reduce the total amount of trash produced. Perhaps you've been to the home of an Asian family and see the numerous collections of plastic bags and reused ice cream containers to store other food products and etc, etc. Well this, as stupid as it feels, is the biggest ways to live a Zero-Trash life. It saves cash too! No more need to buy trash bags when u have the bags given to you when u shop at Walmart. The milk jugs u had just emptied could be the cheapest water bottle u can buy for a road trip. The list goes on and on, the more creative you are with your trash, the cheaper life becomes. Now recycling is easy but most people just throw their ''recyclable" trash into the recycle bins and thats it. However there is alot more to recycling than there seems to it. Lets talk about plastics. Plastics are not all the same, the plastic used to make a lego brick is not exactly the same as the plastic used to make bags. And you would think so too, one being sturdy and one being flexible. Well plastics are labelled differently. If you look around on your plastic products, you should see a triangle with a number in it, like in the picture below. Now plastics labelled numbers 1-6 are recyclable whereas 7 is not recyclable. Each number represents a different type of plastic so of 1-6 which are most easily recycled. Well let us talk about 6, polystyrene, also known as styrofoam. Easily identifiable by look and the one you should avoid the most. 1 would be the most common plastic, a plastic that ends with -pete like polyethylene terephthalate, usually used to make soda bottles. 3 is PVC, polyvinyl chloride, used to makes pipes etc. 4 is a flexible plastic, low-density polyethylene, usually used to make plastic bags. Plastics that are not in 1-6 like nylon is in 7 which is not recyclable. Now let us talk about composting. This is to get rid of non-recyclable organic materials such as banana peels or remains of vegetables after cutting and washing. I'm sure you'all have heard of composting before but probably thoughts its hard to setup or start. Well today i shall debunk that and make your life a heck load easier with composting. First let us define organic material. Anything that you know comes from the earth, except metals, are considered organic. This includes fruits, vegetables and weeds. Now here's the thing, after the food is cooked like leftover fried chicken, we usually don't wanna compost it. This is as the oil from foods like these can cause issues with the compost's consistency and the decomposers doing the job. Meats are some thing you might want to avoid as well; proteins give off ammonia and urea when undergoing decomposition, the chemical that makes urine smell, so you might not want to use meats. Now let us start with how to establish a compost. First you should look for a location in your backyard or if you're comfortable with it like me, you can do it indoors. Then again its recommended to do this outdoors around the soil. You can start your compost in a hole in your backyard or in a bin, preferbly not made of wood. You can technically do it just on the soil itself but that's unsightly. Decomposition happens naturally by bacteria, that's why your food can rot, but it happens very slowly. So now we need decomposers such as earthworms and millipedes. Earthworms should easily be found when digging into your backyard or front lawn. Millipedes can be found in parks under leaf litter and tall grass. Be careful as millipedes can spray a foul smelling gas around its body as u pick it up so try to use gloves. Put these little critters into the compost bin along with a bit of soil and dampen it with water. From now on you can place whatever organic material you want to get rid off in here. If you are interested in bringing the bin up to the next level, you can consider introducing woodlouse, commonly found under rotting logs. The compost formed can be used on plants in your yard or mixed with soil for potted plants. It's basically natural fertiliser. Now the benefits of living a Zero-Trash life is clear, less money is spent and life becomes easier when disposing your trash, no hassle over large heavy trash bags and foul smelling rotting food. It kinda forces you to eat cheaper and healthier too, spending less on meats that usually come in plastic packaging and more on fresh vegetables. This is all at the same time of helping the environment, remember that we have just one Earth, and its is our precious Earth that we live on, if we don't protect it, it'll be gone before we know it. (Photo credits: Wikiwand) The biotech industry has always been a flourishing industry with constant new innovations. This led to a rise in investments in the global biotech economy. Costs of doing biotech research has also significantly decreased. One example of cheaper research costs is the cost of DNA sequencing. Sequencing technology has advanced so far that prices has dropped from almost $10,000 per megabase to less than a dollar per megabase. The graph below shows the rapid rate of increasing affordability of DNA sequencing, dropping by half almost every year. Time and time again the biotech industry amazes us with its remarkable growth and life changing works such as gene therapy and genetic modification.
So why is the biotech industry dying? To answer this question first we must look at what the biotech industry is doing for the general public. Lets name what the biotech industry has done to change lives: Gene therapy, creation of GM Food, Cancer treatments... ... ...well? Not many more huh? This is the problem of lack of transparency and educating the public on what the biotech industry actually is doing! Perhaps you could name research going on such as stem cell research or research for new vaccines and antibiotics, but the general public doesn't seem to know more! If we do not educate our investors in what we are actually doing, how are we going to maintain the confidence of our investors? Many of you people in business are there shouting " WITH GOOD MARKETING OF COURSE!" Well this is where the second issue comes about. Products of the biotech industry is falsely being marketed. To understand how it's falsely being marketed, me must look at the general public's view on how our products work. Lets look at sequencing technology again shall we? To a general public's point of view, DNA sequencing is most likely to perhaps get a blood sample, run it in a machine and voilà! We now have your whole genome. This is very wrong! It is definitely not as simple as that! Marketing and advertising our products so falsely like this is extremely detrimental to the biotech economy. Sure, we will get investors in the short run but once we are unable to produce products of the level of advancement we are advertising as, we will lose these investors! Soon, we won't have any investors and the whole industry will crash. Losing investors is one thing but once we start to lose the confidence of people looking to join the industry, all we are left with is our senior professors with no one to mentor or teach. That might just mark the end of an era for the advancement in biotechnology. And this is why the biotech industry might fall. If we don't start changing the way the biotech industry is run, this economy will just crash and burn. |
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