Question about genetically-modified plants?

Question

Is there any genetic change that could *only* ever be achieved by directly manipulating genetic material, as opposed to waiting however long it takes for the right mutations to arise at random, and then breeding selectively to enhance the desired features?

Answer 1

How often do you see a fish and a vegetable getting it on?

Sometimes its easier taking that shortcut.

We only have 100 years or so in our lives- lets not waste it on watching the plant grow into a monster.

Its easier to manipulate, and watch the perfectly grown crop with highest yield..with perfect fruits....grown in a short amount of time....

so on...

Plants are engineered for money.

Governments encourage things like that.

Answer 2

Yes there are modifications that do this. Many times the modification could have occurred naturally but its much faster to do it in a lab. One misconception about modifications is that other species or animal dna is being put into the plants. Geneticist observe animal genetics and try to use the same principles in the plants but they never cut and paste dna into plants.  

Answer 3

There is some cut and pasting going on in genetic engineering. I don't see why this can never happen in plant genetics. Look into how human insulin is manufactured.

Answer 4

I'm going to say yes for a couple of reasons:

1) it would take an unfathomable amount of time to wait for some mutations to arise, many millions of years.  one of the reasons for this is my second point.

2) Mutations will happen less often in some genes that are very necessary for their organism, mainly because if they happened they organism would not survive.  Sometimes it won't even survive to be a few cells, for e.g. if it was crucial in replication or cell division.  Scientists have ways of studying lethal mutations, for e.g. they can make the gene active at one temperature and mutant at another temperature or express them in a specific tissue instead of the whole organism (an example would be expressing in drosophila fly eyes, so the whole fly develops but they have smaller or no eye or something like that.  So in reality yeah, some mutations don't work naturally.

Also, very few animal genes have been put into plants (I can't think of any off the top of my head), it's more likely that  a gene would be deleted from a plant, or a plant gene put into a different plant. Maybe even a fungal or bacterial gene into a plant? animals don't have a lot of genes that would improve plant yield or survival.