Sugar from GM Sugarcane at Par With That from Conventional Sugarcane

Centro de Tecnologia Canavieira (CTC) of Brazil evaluated their genetically modified (GM) sugarcanes' products against sugar made of conventional sugarcanes. Results showed that there were no distinguishable differences between the two.

CTC used three of their developed varieties of insect-protected sugarcane designed to control sugarcane borer damage to compare it with the conventional sugarcanes. These were grown in four different plots to produce four batches each of processed raw sugar, for a total of 12 independent batches. The researchers then used event-specific probes and DNA detection methods to identify the junction of sugarcane genomic DNA as well as the inserted DNA of two of their GM varieties. The same approach was used for the third GM variety. The experiments were validated using ELISA assays. The study showed that no event-specific DNA and no GM proteins were detectable in all 12 batches of raw sugar from the GM sugarcanes, concluding that there are no distinguishable differences between the sugar produced from the GM lines versus the sugar from their non-GM counterparts.

They published their results in GM Crops & Food.