With the recent approval of GMO apples and potatoes by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it’s tempting to think of genetically modified organisms (GMO) as both modern and scientific. But it turns out that the first GMO was produced by another kind of scientist…nature. Soil bacteria created the first genetically modified crop 8,000 years ago, reports AgriMarketing.
Scientists from Peru’s International Potato Center, a gene bank and research institution devoted to all things potato, looked at the genes of 291 sweet potato varieties grown worldwide. They found evidence of the same set of bacterial genes in each one of them—a finding they call rather remarkable in the paper they published about the research.
The team’s research suggests that soil bacteria infected ancient plants, inserting its DNA into wild sweet potatoes that were then planted (and replanted) by ancient peoples who found them to be edible. Over time, researchers say, the infected potato became domesticated and widely disseminated.
Sweet potatoes have been declared the world’s seventh most important crop by the United Nations. All cultivated sweet potatoes contain the DNA.