genetically modified organism
A genetically modified organism, or GMO, is simply any organism whose genome has been deliberately altered using genetic engineering techniques. The change might be a gene added from another species, a gene removed or switched off, or a sequence edited in place — what unites them is that the alteration was made on purpose with laboratory tools.
The phrase is broad and largely a regulatory and everyday category rather than a precise biological one. All transgenic organisms are GMOs, but a GMO need not carry a foreign gene: an organism whose own DNA has been edited to disable a gene also counts. Conventional selective breeding, by contrast, changes genomes too, yet is usually not labeled GMO because it does not use direct molecular intervention.
GMOs appear across medicine, agriculture, and industry — engineered microbes that make insulin, crops modified for pest resistance or nutrition, and laboratory organisms used in research. They are also the subject of genuine public debate over safety, environmental impact, labeling, and ethics. Scientific bodies generally judge approved GMO foods to be as safe to eat as their conventional counterparts, while the broader social questions remain matters of policy and values.
Golden Rice, engineered to make a precursor of vitamin A in its grain, is a GMO developed to help address vitamin A deficiency in some populations.
Adding a nutritional trait by engineering makes the crop a GMO.
GMO is a category defined largely by how a change was made (direct genetic engineering), not by how different the result is; some genome-edited organisms carry changes indistinguishable from natural mutations, which complicates regulation.