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- REHOVOT, Israel (Reuters) - Israeli scientists have developed a revolutionary
technique to accelerate tree and plant growth by up to 50 percent, an approach
that could have a major effect on future food production and help restore
depleted rain forests worldwide.
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- Armed with a "gene gun" and
a petri dish, Hebrew University scientists have been inserting a cellulose-binding
gene into plant cells, the building blocks of trees and crops.
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- "We isolated a gene from bacteria
that produces protein that binds to cellulose," says chief researcher
Oded Shoseyov . "Cellulose is the major component of the plant's cell,
and now, by taking the gene and inserting it into a plant ... we have been
able to modulate the plant's growth."
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- Results over the past year show that
trees treated the so-called CBD gene grow faster and healthier. Shoseyov
said that by introducing the gene into plants, they have the ability to
increase the rate of cellulose biosynthesis and modulate their growth.
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- The technology has been in use since
the early 1990s in the textile and pharmaceutical fields. Israeli and U.S.
scientists first discovered the CBD gene in the 1980s.
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- Experimental forests already have been
set up in Virginia in the United States, while crops like tomatoes, corn
and potatoes are still being tested in the laboratory.
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- Shoseyov said that the research data
compiled is mostly from work done on poplar trees -- trees used for pulp
and paper. But he is confident that the technology will have wider applications
to other plants and trees, perhaps heralding a green revolution.
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- CBD Technologies, a four-year-old biotechnological
start-up which has received a U.S. patent for the technique, expects the
process to enter the commercial market within five years. But it says unfounded
public fears of genetically modified food could prove a marketing obstacle,
although the process is claimed to be an absolute "green technology."
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- Director-general of CBD Technologies
Stanley Hirsch said the technique could help fend off a potential worldwide
food crisis in the next millennium.
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- The world's population is projected to
double over the next thirty years, he said. Such explosive growth will
require food production over the same period to equal as much as the world
has produced over the past ten thousand years, he said.
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