Sweet Potatoes Are Natural GMOs Created 8,000 Years Ago

The first genetically modified crop was not created in a lab by a biotech company. It was created by bacteria 8,000 years ago. Scientists at Peru's International Potato Center examined the genes of 291 sweet potato varieties from around the world and found evidence of the same bacterial genes in every single one. Soil bacteria called Agrobacterium infected ancient wild sweet potatoes and inserted their DNA into the plants. This genetic modification helped the roots swell into the edible forms we recognize today. When humans began farming sweet potatoes, they selected plants with these foreign genes, and the modification spread as the crop traveled across the globe. Today, sweet potatoes are the world's seventh most important crop, and every cultivated variety contains this ancient bacterial DNA. As one researcher put it, people have been eating a GMO for thousands of years without knowing it.