Iogen’s choice of a wheat straw feedstock was made on practical and commercial grounds from a limited choice of agricultural and other biomass resources in Canada available on a sufficiently large scale to support a bioethanol industry (section 4.1). Wheat, as a monoculture, is inevitably subject to crop losses arising from pathogen infestation. Modern biotechnology and genetic manipulation offer novel solutions to the development of resistance mechanisms as well as yield improvements through increased efficiency of nutrient usage and tolerance to drought, and other seasonal and unpredictable stresses. But the deliberate release of any such genetically modi­fied (GM) species is contentious, highly so in Europe where environmental cam­paigners are still skeptical that GM technologies offer any advantage over traditional plant breeding and are without the associated risks of monopoly positions adopted by international seed companies, the acquisition of desirable traits by “weed” species, and the horizontal transfer of antibiotic resistance genes to microbes.282 The positive aspects of plant biotechnology have, in contrast, been succinctly expressed:

Genetic transformation has offered new opportunities compared with traditional breed­ing practices since it allows the integration into a host genome of specific sequences leading to a strong reduction of the casualness of gene transfer.283

Because large numbers of insertional mutants have been collected in a highly manip — ulable “model” plant species (Arabidopsis thaliana), it has been possible for some years to inactivate any plant gene with a high degree of accuracy and certainty.