A Self Fermenting Food Supply  

Technology Review has an article on a really bad idea - corn that can turn itself into biofuel (the genetic engineer's approach to fermenting the food supply). I'm not really into banning things but this would appear to be a good candidate.

Its not just that the foolishness of turning food into fuel should be apparent to everyone by now - there is also what I think of as the "brown goo" problem - what happens if these genes spread more widely than expected ?

In an effort to help boost the nation's supply of biofuels, researchers have created three strains of genetically modified corn to manufacture enzymes that break down the plant's cellulose into sugars that can be fermented into ethanol. Incorporating such enzymes directly into the plants could reduce the cost of converting cellulose into biofuel.

Last year, new federal regulations called for production of renewable fuels to increase to 36 billion gallons annually--nearly five times current levels--by 2022. Today, nearly all fuel ethanol in the United States is produced from corn kernels. To meet the required increase, researchers are turning to other sources, such as cellulose, a complex carbohydrate found in all plants. Corn leaves and stems, prairie grasses, and wood chips are leading candidates for supplies of cellulose. Cellulosic ethanol has many advantages over that produced from corn kernels. Cellulose is not only extremely abundant and inexpensive; studies also suggest that the production and use of ethanol from cellulose could yield fewer greenhouse gases.

However, the biggest obstacle to making cellulosic ethanol commercially feasible is the breakdown of cellulose. Enzymes that degrade cellulose, called cellulases, are typically produced by microbes grown inside large bioreactors, an expensive and energy-intensive process. "In order to make cellulosic ethanol really competitive, we really need to bring those costs down," says Michael J. Blaylock, vice president of system development at Edenspace, a crop biotechnology firm based in Manhattan, KS.

Mariam Sticklen, professor of crop and soil science at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, figured that she could eliminate the cost of manufacturing enzymes by engineering corn plants to produce the enzymes themselves. Instead of relying on the energy-intensive process of producing them in bioreactors, "the plants use the free energy of the sun to produce the enzymes," she says. ...

To avoid the possibility of transferring the genes to other crops or wild plants, the enzymes are only produced in the plant's leaves and stems, not in its seeds, roots, or pollen, says Sticklen. What's more, to prevent the corn from digesting itself, she engineered the plants so that the enzymes accumulate only in special storage compartments inside the cells, called vacuoles. The cellulases are released only after the plant is harvested, during processing.