Hey everyone. I am very ignorant on this issue and was wondering if anyone could answer me this question or at least point me in the right direction:

Is there a difference between genetic modifying as in with genetically modified food or cloned bulls, and natural hybrids as in grafted fruit trees of different kinds and mules?

Any help would be great. Thanks

Brave new world

As far as I know, natural hybrids take a combination of the two genes from the parent doners to create the hybrid, where as Genetic Modification can create entirely new gene sequences that have never existed before.

I'm wary of Genetic Modification. In programming terms, it's like writing a new piece of code and throwing it into the live environment, whereas a natural hybrid seems to me more like taking two pre-written (and tested) functions, and merging the two.

Thank you very much tiggs mate! Would you be able to explain in layman terms how they create new gene sequences?

I didn't know, so I had to look it up. I thought it would be slice and dice the genome, but - would you believe with a Gene Gun?

Jesus! It seems all too easy!

I was thinking how there is the old saying 'you are what you eat'. Well would it apply you rekon with genetically modified food? As in we may become (for better or worse) modified perhaps even very subtly by eating over long or short periods of time genetically modified food?

Is there such a thing as a '' Natural Hybrid?. And wouldnt a grafted fruit tree be considerd genetic modification?

I dont know hence why I have asked. Though tiggs answer seems adequate.

Eating genetically modified food is no more likely to affect your genome than any other food. DNA is DNA, regardless of the sequence it carries.

I am currently in my third summer of working at the National Human Genome Research Institute. On a regular basis when working there I make genetically modified bacteria and this month I will be, for my first time, transfecting modified DNA into tumor cells. It will be a slightly modified version of a gene already present in the cell, modified such that we can easily see where the protein produced is in the cell with an antibody and try to figure out what it is doing.

With the exception of a single novel gene JUST produced this year, every gene that is ever put into anything is derived from another organism. It is often structurally different - the noncoding introns are usually removed, for example, to make the molecule smaller and easier to work with in bacteria or in vitro. But the protein-coding region is either copied verbatum from another organism, or has a few choice changes that delete pieces of the protein or join domains from disperate proteins or, like the transformation I will be doing make it easier to see. i can give a detailed description of a few examples if anybody's interested. DNA expression is in some ways well understood, but the regulation of genes is less well understood. It is fairly easy to tell what a gene will produce just from the sequence, what is harder is telling how strongly it will be expressed or its effects on the rest of the genome and cell.

Well genetic engineering can put sequences from quite divergent species into each other and force them to be expressed in their new environment. Good exampes are the Flavrsaver tomato or Roundup resistant wheat. There have also been attempts to make salt resistant strains of rice and drought resistant plants. Another factor to consider is that these transgenic species are usually fertile (although some can be made to be non breeding to maximise seed sales to farmers).
The biggest factors to overcome are in getting the new gene to be expressed which usually means that two things have to be done
First, the gene may have to be modified so that its codons are more akin to its new host
Second, the correct promoter/enhancer domain(s) has to be attached to the enew gene or failing that it has to be inserted into the genome adjacent to an active gene and make use of its promoter/enhancer domains
Third it may be necessary to includesome non coding 5' and 3' and/or some intron regions to enhance the estability/processing of the new gene
Fourth, you may want to include some kind of tag so that you can be sure that thenew protein is functional in a trial run before moving to full scale tests.

The biggest challenge in all of this is usually trying to insert the new gene into the cell in the first place. We can use chemical, electrical or shuttle vectors all of which have their disadvantages.

A mule is a natural hybrid. There are several species that can mate and have offspring. This offspring generally cannot reproduce though.