Transgenic DHA & EPA

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Natural or transgenic, omega 3 fatty acids create lipofuscin stress pigments, the building blocks of Yellow Fat Disease.

Lipofuscin is the “classical age or stress pigment,” and lipopigments are the “end products of lipid peroxidation.”

Natural or transgenic, Yellow Fat Disease (cumulative lipofuscinosis) is “death by a thousand paper cuts.”

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M. Sprague, M. B. Betancor, & D. R. Tocher (“Microbial and genetically engineered oils as replacements for fish oil in aquaculture feeds,” Biotechnology Letters, Jul. 18, 2017) wrote …

“The two oilseed crops that have been viewed as potential platforms for engineering n-3 LC-PUFA are Camelina (Camelina sativa) and Canola (Brassica napus L.) with research primarily being led by the Agricultural Science Research Institute, Rothamsted Research (Harpenden, UK) and the Australian National Science Agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Australia). The successful accumulation of n-3 LC-PUFA into plant hosts has been primarily based upon work performed in the model species Arabidopsis (Petrie et al. 2012; Ruiz-Lopez et al. 2013). Ruiz-Lopez et al. (2014) then transferred this technology to Camelina as a host species with constructs consisting of five or seven marine microalgal genes for the purpose of engineering an EPA-only or an EPA + DHA oil, respectively. The authors reported an EPA content of 24% of total fatty acids in the EPA-only oil, whereas the EPA + DHA iteration gave an EPA and DHA content of 11 and 8% respectively.”

According to the same source …

“Seafood is a rich source of protein, vitamins and minerals as well as being the main dietary source of the omega-3 (n-3) long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA), eicosapentaenoic (EPA; 20:5n-3) and docosahexaenoic (DHA; 22:6n-3) acids, that are conditionally essential for human health and development (Calder 2014; Tocher 2015).”

“Conditionally essential?” Isn’t that lawyer-speak?

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What’s the difference between a lawyer and a haddock?

One’s cold and slimy, the other’s a fish.

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According to Dr. Surinder Singh (2010) …

“In addition to taking a commercial approach to producing omega-3 oils in canola for Australia and other developed countries the Omega-3 Land Plants team is examining the feasibility of philanthropically developing an omega-3 crop for African production. Cowpea leaves are a staple diet in West Africa and the group has demonstrated that it is technically possible to engineer DHA in leaf tissue. A scoping study is being conducted to determine whether this would be a suitable application for the technology and a means of increasing the intake of DHA in developing countries.”

Do Africans need philanthropically-developed “conditionally essential” omega 3 oils too?

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Who is Dr. Surinder Singh?

“In 2004/2005 his project team also achieved world-first production of nutritionally important long chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA), EPA and DHA, in seed oil. This required the discovery, introduction and coordinated expression of transgenes encoding an entire biosynthetic pathway comprising five discrete enzymatic conversion steps and represents one of the most complex pathway introductions so far achieved in plant metabolic engineering.”

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I’m not picking on Dr. Singh.

There are tens of thousands of dedicated gene jockeys working for hundreds of companies focused on manufacturing biotech omega 3 fatty acids.

The primary fault lies with the 99 Percent, who default to “scientific explanations” provided by exploitative marketers working for the 1 Percent.

The sky IS falling. Chicken Little was right all along.