When most of us go into a grocery store and buy tomatoes, they find hard, pale-red stuff that are tasteless and barely worth buying. This is because tomatoes must be picked before they are ripe to prevent them from rotting during shipping. Even though, vine ripening is the secret to success it has not been possible, until now. Genetic engineering was once thought of to be impossible, but today we are capable of making a "super food". Or, are we? Recently, people began linking up genes to mix with certain species for many reasons such as world hunger, to save time and money, for better taste, and other reasons as well. However, genetic engineering is imprecise and unpredictable. By inserting genes from organisms that have never been eaten as food, new proteins are introduced into the human and animal food chains. There is concern that these could cause serious environmental problems, or worse it can cause health problems to humans.
Splicing foreign genetic material into genomes, creating new organisms that could never arise in nature, creates genetically engineered foods. The most common form of gene-splicing is to first find the gene that you would want and cut it out with restriction enzymes. Then you would produce recombinant DNA by placing the gene in a vector or plasmid (a circular piece of DNA that can replicate autonomously from the main chromosome). Next, they clone the gene by inserting it into a bunch of bacteria and grow the culture. Last, they screen the cells and take the ones that have the gene and infect it in the target crop. Soon it overcomes the crop's defense against unknown DNA and forces it to express the gene. Once inserted, both its gene and its helpers are passed on to future generations; they may mutate, recombine with viruses, or be transferred "horizontally" to other organisms. Another way of inserting a gene into a plant is to coat the genes onto large number of pellets made from gold or tungsten.
