Biotechnology: Studying Peaches to Improve Biofuel

The Article I read was titled "Peach Genome Offers Insights Into Breeding Strategies for Biofuels Crops" on Sciencedaily.com. In this article, scientists are studying plants such as peaches in order to learn ways to improve crops used to make biofuel. This article affects readers because biofuel is an important product and one that holds a great potential for improving our world. Biofuel is Eco-friendly, meaning it is healthy to the environment because creating it does not use non-renewable resources. Improvements made on this product could mean a great deal to the world. It could slow down or prevent the oncoming threat of global-warming, and could also benefit the economy.

In this article, scientists are looking at ways to modify crops such as poplars and willows in order to benefit the biofuel industry. When dealing with genetic modification of crops, a few problems arise. The problem is that GMO's hold potential unknown risks that could harm human health or the environment. There is concern that GMO's may have unforeseen effects on nontarget organisms.There is also concern of the introduced genes being released from a transgenic crop into closely related weeds through crop–to–weed hybridization.The real question is, do these possible risks outweigh the possible benefits this research could have? I think that the benefits outweigh the risks because our world is in danger due to global warming and anything that can be done to help is extremely important.

This article could be a bit biased because it did not mention any risks this modification of plants could have. This article only mentioned what good the research could bring. This connects to what we are learning in class because in chapter 38 we learned about the benefits and risks of genetically modified crops and plants.