Antibiotic resistance and Syngenta's Bt 10 Maize

By Dr. Sue Mayer, Executive Director, GeneWatch UK

Publication date: May 2005

Summary
In May the journal Nature revealed that Syngenta had inadvertently produced and distributed a variety of GM maize, Bt 10, which did not have regulatory approval. Several hundred tonnes of the Bt10 maize was grown and distributed in the US between 2001 and 2004 and possibly exported elsewhere. It has emerged that the Bt10 also contains a gene that gives resistance to the antibiotic ampicillin. Yet Syngenta will not disclose the full details of how Bt10 has been genetically modified.