The Flavr Savr tomato is the first food to benefit from the United States Government's ruling, in 1992, which stated that food derived from gene-altered plants is not required to undergo any special tests. Leguminous plants such as peas and beans produce their own fertilizer, through the rhizobia bacteria in their root nodules, which fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. Biotechnologists are working on transferring this characteristic to rice plants, either by turning them into legumes or encouraging nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil to move into their root cells. This could save poor farmers large sums of money, and transform yields in such regions as Southeast Asia, where an area larger than Sweden and Norway has soils too poor to sustain high-yielding rice varieties. A tool for conservation Biotechnology offers scientists new methods for conserving genetic diversity, particularly useful for plants which are sterile or have poor germination rates and whose seeds do not store well.
Tissue culture makes it possible to store cells, as opposed to seeds or plants.
Cryopreservation - storage at very low temperatures freezes cell development and has been used successfully for cassava, coffee, banana and sugar cane germplasm. These methods require less space than preserving cuttings in vitro or in field collections, which are vulnerable to pests, disease and disasters. Biotechnology also makes it possible to detect and eliminate diseases in gene bank collections and offers more efficient ways of distributing germplasm to users. The New World screwworm has now been eradicated from the United States and Mexico using biotechnology. The larvae of the flies are sterilized.