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Submitted by ashorey on Sun, 10/06/2019 - 15:17

People may have heard of Round Up weed killer, but might not have a complete understanding of its use of GMOs. Round up, while in production, relied on a plant enzyme pathway that involved the synthesis of a single monomer that was used as a base to produce three necessary amino acids. Round would cause the inability to synthesize the amino acid from the intermediate monomer forcing death of the plants. To survive Round Up, the crops were genetically altered to survive the chemical interaction with Round Up. The genetically modified plants and crops of interest that the farmers grew would not be affected by this deadly chemical because it could not bind to their intermediate proteins that were products of altered DNA, but the amino acids were still successfully synthesized, so the GMO plants would survive. This seemingly ideal process has potential problems. Firstly, if there is any possibility of cross-pollinating with a related species, this genetically modified sequence could find itself in an uncultivated species that could become very invasive with the use of the round up. Any transfer of the gene could cause superweeds that are immune to roundup. Also, this plathway is in many plants, making it an effective weed killer, but highly unspecialized. It could easily target species that do not compete with the crops when roundup goes into the soil or runs off into streams, etc. This makes the roundup chemical highly dangerous in the use ouside a closed system like a greenhouse. Furthermore, the roundup company had a monopoly on the "roundup ready" species, meaning the genetically modified organisms that were resistant to roundup. This made the project a conflict of interest. They were selling the locks and the keys, which was an extremely successful business model, but the gains may have prevented the haste of an investigation into the loses, allowing the use of Round Up to continue far to long, leaving a permanent impact on our ecological systems already. 

 

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This is an interesting read. I did not know how round up worked and actually always wondered that. I would break this up thought and start a new paragraphs here" This seemingly ideal process has potential problems. Firstly, if there is any possibility of cross-pollinating....."

Changing 'This makes the roundup chemical highly dangerous in the use ouside a closed system like a greenhouse.' to ' This makes the use of the roundup chemical outside a closed system, like a greenhouse, highly dangerous'. This way you stress the highly dangerous phrase as its the last thing the reader reads.

When describing the brand Roundup, be sure to spell and capitalize the brand name properly.