SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/765909
FIELD SCIENCE 20 SportsTurf | January 2017 www.sportsturfonline.com quantum change that will put us back in the days of Merion or Raleigh in terms of product features. Those are the kind of changes offered by GM turf. Roundup resistance is only a building block. You are probably wondering why the first GM turf product to make it to market is for Roundup resistance. If you think about it, that does seem odd. We already have a plethora of herbicides to control most any weed that comes in our path. Even homeowners have a goodly number of choices at the local box store. What does Roundup resistance bring to the table? Roundup resistance is a "platform" that biotech scientists use to create GM varieties. When lab scientists insert genes into plant cells, they have no idea which cells are taking up the genes and which are not. If they're lucky, 1% of plant cells will be transformed with the new genes. But how do you pick out those lucky 1% from the 99% that are unmodified? Simple, if you add a gene for Roundup resistance. Spraying Roundup herbicide on the resulting plantlets easily kills off the 99% that did not absorb the new genes. This makes it easy for biotechnologists to spot the transformed plants in the lab. They refer to this clever trick as a selectable marker. All of the major agronomic crops (corn, soybean, cotton, alfalfa, canola, sugarbeet, etc.) all started out with Roundup resistance as their basic platform. Later they "stacked" additional genes on with the Roundup gene to add features to new varieties. Today, corn and soybean production in the US is greater than 90% GM. ■ BY DOUG BREDE, PHD This article originally appeared in an issue of Turfgrass Producers International's Turf News, which is why it refers to "farms" a few times. Our thanks to TPI for allowing us to reprint it here. A December 2014 article in the Capital Press, a West Coast Ag newspaper, indicated that the Scotts-Miracle Gro company had gained federal deregulation of Roundup Ready turf tall fescue, with similar innovations in Kentucky bluegrass and St. Augustinegrass not far behind. This means they are free to plant and market genetically modified (GM) turf crops without further federal regulation. Genetically modified crops are commonplace in most Ag production fields. But this marks the first time GM has entered the turfgrass realm. This article is a review of some of the pros and cons involved with GM turf. It's a good time to examine this new technology before sales get underway. WHY THE TURFGRASS SOD INDUSTRY NEEDS GM TURF All industries commoditize over time. New industries initially spring to life by an innovation. Old-timers will remember when Merion bluegrass, Meyer zoysia, or Raleigh St. Augustine hit the market. Turfgrass producers couldn't grow them fast enough. Raleigh was the subject of a whole episode of Fox's King of the Hill. Meyer was featured on the Arthur Godfrey show. And, well, Merion was everywhere. Consumers were buying on features rather than price. Later, as time went by and competitors entered the market, competition soon centered on price instead of features. That's commoditization. As a turfgrass breeder, I have seen some remarkable advances in our lifetimes in turfgrass genetics; all of these changes brought about by conventional cross-pollination and not laboratory methods. But I think our industry is ready for a ABOVE: A "selectable marker" is used by biotechnologists to separate out cells that received the new genes from those that didn't. Later, by a change in the growth media, scientists regenerate grass plants from these cancer-like blobs of living tissue. AT LEFT: The gene gun that's used by Scotts and others for inserting new genes into plant cells. This device initially used a 22-caliber bullet to propel genes at high velocity into cells. Later models used compressed air rather than ammunition. IS GENETICALLY MODIFIED TURF IN YOUR FUTURE? PHOTOS BY DOUG BREDE.