US, Brazil seek patent to Tanzania sorghum

Tanzania is planning to move to court to stop the US and Brazilian governments, jointly with two multinational firms, from patenting a sorghum gene isolated from Tanzanian farms.

The strain of sorghum — a staple food in the country — has been proved to be acid-aluminium tolerant.

Tanzania explains that patenting this crop is fatal to its food security, and violates international treaties.

It would also increase local food prices as multinational corporations seek to exploit their patent to boost profits by selling sorghum seeds at a high prices at a time when millions of Tanzanians currently living under conditions of abject poverty are struggling to put food on their table.

This is because the value of their money is increasingly eroded due to high inflation.

The gene was assigned to the US as represented by the secretary of agriculture, Washington DC.

The application was filed on May 17, 2007, with prior publication on November 20, 2008, under US patent No. 7,582,809.

The application was made to the US patent and trade office, an agency of the department of commerce by Kochian Leon of Ithaca, New York, on September 1, 2009.

Kochian, jointly applied with fellow researchers Jiping Liu, Ithaca of New York, Jurandir Vieira de Magalhaes of Belo Horizonte-MG (Brazil), Claudia Teixeira Guimaraes of Sete Lagoas-MG (Brazil), Robert Eugene Schaffert, Sete Lagoas-MG (Brazil), Vera Maria Carvalho Alves, Sete Lagoas-MG (Brazil) and Patricia Klein, College Station, Texas (US)

The scientists explain that they produced the aluminium-tolerant plant through the genetic transformation of the wild types.

The major aluminum-tolerance gene, or the SbMATE gene, encodes a root citrate efflux transporter that is al-inducible at the level of gene transcription, and is also al-activated at the level of protein function.

A high level of expression of the SbMATE gene and the protein were found in roots of higher plants, including rice.

They explain that the successful transformation of the genes provides strong evidence that SbMATE can work across species to enhance tolerance to aluminium in other important crops grown in locations that are present in acid soils toxic to plants.

This involved an elaborate process in which a molecule of the plant protein with the ability to tolerate aluminium is prepared by cloning and transferred to the plant’s cells from which it is regenerated.

Dar-es-Salaam’s threats comes amid a report saying that government researchers from the US department of agriculture, Brazil’s Agricultural Research Corporation and Texas A&M University have patented the gene with the US Patent Office in September 2009.