## GMO plants of the first and second generation

Even though many different types of GMO food have been created since the 1990s, GMO variants of agriculturally important crops – rice, corn, soy, and others – still have the greatest impact on public life worldwide. The original strategy for modifying these crops was to insert genes into them that would allow these plants to resist herbicides that kill most other plants. Afterwards, it was possible to intensively spray the fields with herbicides and get rid of all the weeds, while the cultivated plants survived without damage. This procedure created the entire first generation of GMO crops, most of which are resistant to the herbicide Roundup (commonly called "Roundup Ready"). The list of Roundup Ready plants today includes soybeans, corn, beets, wheat, and others. This type of modification allows growers to obtain a larger amount of harvest on the same fields, thus bringing them the main advantage. Compared to the first generation of GMO crops, the second-generation GMO plants were designed so that their modification brings benefits to consumers. A typical example of such plant is the so-called golden rice, a genetically modified rice with three introduced genes allowing the synthesis of β-carotene in the seeds. β-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, is an antioxidant and is important for the proper development of vision in childhood. Since in some of the Asian (e.g., India, Vietnam, Laos) and African countries, vitamin A is poorly represented in the available food, many (especially poor) people suffer from its deficiency. As a result, in 2005, up to 190 million children were likely affected by vision disorders or, in extreme cases, blindness. Golden rice was subsequently planted in these countries to help solve the problem. Other similar projects included the preparation of tomatoes producing resveratrol and other plants with various antioxidants overproduced in their fruits.