Source: As Reported in the News
The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology

Sacramento Bee

Kim Carney has never tasted black-eyed peas, but working with them in the laboratory is tough enough to give a scientist a stomachache, reports the Sacramento Bee.

A staff research associate in the University of California, Davis, Plant Transformation Facility, Carney has tried for two years to genetically engineer the little legume, with the goal of feeding hungry African people. The pea won't cooperate.

Either its cells don't take up foreign DNA, or, if they do, those cells don't grow into a new plant.

Carney isn't the first person to be thwarted this way. George Bruening, the UC Davis plant pathologist overseeing the project, figures that scientists collectively have spent the equivalent of 20 to 30 years of one person's life trying to transform the pea. For reasons probably related to their physiology, legumes are notoriously hard to engineer.

Nevertheless, one of the most abundantly grown genetically engineered crops is a legume - the soybean. That was hard, too, but numerous companies threw their efforts into it because the soybean is a hugely valuable commodity. The black-eyed pea is not.

According to the Sacramento Bee, unlike soy, it doesn't appear in foods all over the map. The crop is most important to poor countries of western and central Africa, where it's known as the cowpea. It's a good source of protein in a place where other forms of protein are too costly or hard to come by, according to Bruening.

Here's the problem: A caterpillar called Maruca vitrata drills holes into the pods and gobbles up the precious peas. Chemical insecticides easily kill the pod-borers, but African subsistence farmers typically can't afford the chemicals, Bruening said. Hence, an attempt to engineer black-eyed peas to produce their own insecticide.

The U.S. Agency for International Development gave Bruening $400,000 to work on the pea for two years. The grant is nearly spent, with no success in sight. Unwilling to give up, the professor is scouting for more money.

Carney, who keeps modifying his lab technique in hopes of a breakthrough, figures it will be 10 years, at a minimum, to get a useful engineered pea into the ground in Africa. But he and his boss, lab manager David Tricoli, say there's satisfaction in the project because of its noble aims, says the Sacramento Bee.

"The cowpea is very special," Tricoli said. "We feel very good about it."

As Reported in the News is a weekday feature that summarizes one of the most interesting stories of the day, as reported by media from around the world, and selected by Initiative staff from a scan of the news wires. The Initiative is not a news organization and does not have reporters on its staff: Posting of these stories should not be interpreted as an endorsement of a particular viewpoint, but merely as a summary of news reported by legitimate news-gathering organizations or from press releases sent out by other organizations.