Beet Research Paper

Until 2008, beet farmers in the United States grew B. vulgaris naturally through conventional methods; however, agriculturalists changed their procedures once commercial planting of herbicide-tolerant sugarbeets was approved. Currently, there are three types of resistant sugarbeets. The first type, InVigor sugarbeets, are immune to glyphosate, which is an active defense ingredient in most herbicides. Roundup Ready sugarbeets, another type, are likewise invulnerable to glyphosate (Beta vulgaris GM Events, n.d.). According to M. Jassem, scientists formulated these two genetically modified organisms by transferring a dominant gene of bacterial origin into the sugarbeets, which permits the synthesis of EPSP—an enzyme necessary for growth that would