In October they will be awarded the first World Food Prize of the new millennium in honor of their achievement. It took about 15 years of painstaking traditional crossbreeding experiments before the researchers succeeded in obtaining a viable new strain with the desired nutritional characteristics. Today, it wouldn't have taken this long, thanks to modern gene-splicing techniques, usually called biotechnology. QPM differs from ordinary corn in that it has higher levels of two essential amino acids, lysine and tryptophan.
Amino acids are the building blocks of protein.
Because of these changes, QPM can improve the nutrition of the millions in the Third World for whom corn is a staple food. Vasal and Villegas took that unacceptable maize and transformed it into a strain of maize that was more resistant both to disease and insects, as well as appealing to consumers. According to the scientists, they had to subject up to 500 samples per week to genetic analysis to determine which, if any, of their crossbreeding experiments resulted in the desired new strains. Of course it was. It is also used as the basis for weaning foods for babies in many of these areas.