Bt microbe fools biotech experts

Filed in archive Biotech on October 2, 2006

From the biotech world comes news of some very unexpected consequences of Bt, the most popular microbe engineered into genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Bt, short for bacillus thuringiensis, is the most commonly used natural agent for controlling pests, and Bt corn and other crops engineered with it cover millions of acres in the US alone.

Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are reporting that the Bt microbe works in ways contrary to the commonly held scientific view, says checkbiotech.org. It was thought that Bt caused what's called a toxin-mediated disruption, leading to death by starvation or blood poisoning in the insects it affected. But the researchers discovered that it in fact requires the presence of other bacteria in the gut of the insects they target.

That may not sound like big news to those of us outside the biotech community, but it's being called a "startling new insight" within biotech circles. As Jo Handelsman, one of the report's authors said, "It was one of those assumptions built on assumptions-a scientific house of cards. What was proposed as a hypothesis in one paper became cited as proven in another and no one seemed to go back to the original literature until now."

I find this revelation significant for nanotechnology development because of the uncertainty that shrouds many nanotech applications. We simply can't predict what the consequences of nanomaterials in the environment or in the human body will be. And if we were wrong all along about the basic functioning of the most popular GMO, that certainly raises the possibility that some of our assumptions about nanotech are wrong too.