Bits of bacterial DNA naturally lurk inside sweet potatoes
Long-ago hitchhiker comes from same genus used today to make genetically modified foods
By Susan Milius
Sweet potatoes farmed worldwide picked up a bit of genetic engineering — without human help.
Samples collected from 291 cultivated sweet potatoes carry at least one stretch of DNA from Agrobacterium, says plant molecular biologist Godelieve Gheysen of Ghent University in Belgium. The Agrobacterium genus includes the main bacterial species that makes intentionally transgenic plants possible. It allows geneticists to hitch desired genes to a bacterial delivery service and patch them into a plant’s normal DNA.