found 291 varieties of potatoes.

Scientists discover that these varieties grown in much of the world contain foreign genes that species.

A group of scientists International Potato Center (CIP), one of the largest entities in world devoted to research on tubers, based in Lima, Peru, found genes from soil bacteria inserted into the genome of 291 varieties of potatoes grown in North and South America, Europe, Indonesia, China and Africa.

The finding would mean that the sweet potatoes we consume daily would be transgenic, since even long before mankind began to feed on this species.

The work was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, US. It explains that genes found in yams were originated in two soil bacteria (Agrobacterium tumefaciens y Agrobacterium rizogenes) What, curiously, today they are regularly used as biological vectors by biotechnologists to obtain transgenic plants under controlled conditions.

"The evolution of species was proposed by Charles Darwin and natural selection. In this context, transgenesis always found something unnatural and, Therefore, dangerous. However, now we know that evolution is mediated by complex processes at the molecular level. The finding of bacterial DNA fragments inserted into the genome of some plant realizes the dynamic process of exchange of genetic material between different organisms ", said Raul Wash, Professor consult the Faculty of Agronomy of the UBA (FAUBA), Disclosure site.

The authors of the publication believe that bacterial DNA helped in the process of domestication of yams, because encoding enzymes involved in the synthesis of plant hormones. Thanks to these hormones, the roots were selected for human consumption, perhaps because of its greater size and vigor.

According to the work of CIP, Wash explained that "when the ancestral populations of America began growing sweet potatoes have noticed advantages in those roots and plants were selected bacterial genes. From that moment began the spread of transgenic crop through Polynesia and Southeast Asia, and then to the rest of the world ".

Fernando Carrari, teacher of the Chair of Genetics FAUBA and researcher at INTA and CONICET, explained that, as it happens with transgenes, genes found in yams are functional: "That is expressed like any other gene in the same plant. In addition, some of them were found only in cultivated sweet potatoes and not in their wild relatives ".

"These revelations suggest that, who consume batatas, we have been eating transgenic natural long before man has obtained the first genetically modified plant artificially ", Agrego Gustavo screw, Genetics professor in charge of the FAUBA.

On the other hand, Carrari said that "these findings are not strange because we know that bacteria of the genus Agrobacterium can transfer its DNA to plant cells of different crop species. At the same time, other microorganisms also interact with plant cells from the exchange of genetic material.

For this, that would be expected from knowledge of the complete genomes of many living things, begin to unravel processes and exchange mechanisms DNA so far seem controversial ", concluded.