Talk:Utilization of Bacillus thuringiensis in Genetically Modified Crops

From MicrobeWiki, the student-edited microbiology resource
Revision as of 21:47, 1 May 2015 by Torresd (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

This paper was very interesting and well-written. I appreciated the inclusion of molecular details about B. thuringiensis as well as the ecological impact of genetically modified crops. There are a few typos that I noticed: "expect" in the first paragraph should be "except" and "has resulted to a high demand of food" is somewhat awkward. I think it should be "resulted in..." Beyond that, it might be useful to the reader if you define Bt crops in the introduction as opposed to waiting until later in the paper. Also you may want to, in your introduction, allude to the benefits of genetically modifying crops as opposed to using Bt insecticide. You mention this later, but the beginning begs the question, so it might be fruitful to introduce some of these ideas earlier. Additionally, I was interested in other negative ramifications of these gm crops. Specifically, what effect have they had on farmers' ability to keep up with gm crops and large farms? Are there patents on these gm crops that farmers have to purchase (like Monsanto, etc)? Are people critical of the overproduction of food to keep up with a continually growing population? Did this come up at all in your reading? What is the future of food production if we continue endorsing gm crops like these? These are just questions to consider -- I thought you did a very thorough job and enjoyed reading about this! - Rebecca

This wiki was a great read! I really liked how you went into many different directions with it. I think you should read it over as there are few awkward sentences that stop the flow of the writing like, " low pH of the insect equivalent of a stomach". Overall though I think this topic is very relevant and I think you can even bring up some of the more recent issues with GMOs and Monsanto to continue the comparison you started. It might help the reader to maybe include some more history, if there is any, of pesticide use before Bt to show if it was better or worse comparably. Overall I like it a lot! Nice job!-David T