Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

sciencedaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 173 posts

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#11

Post by spywaregorilla »

eplanit wrote: post #7
andy_ppp wrote: post #2

How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?

I predict that mRNA is going to be an obnoxious fad, where every marketer on the planet tries to leverage the concept/acronym/terminology into their product packaging (regardless of whether it's a medicine, a car part, a floor polish, ...) -- like how Blockchain became such a darling for several years.

That seems unlikely to me. mRNA could be vaguely defined as a biological programming language. I don't think people like thinking about it so its poor marketing too.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#12

Post by politician »

eplanit wrote: post #7
andy_ppp wrote: post #2

How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?

I predict that mRNA is going to be an obnoxious fad, where every marketer on the planet tries to leverage the concept/acronym/terminology into their product packaging (regardless of whether it's a medicine, a car part, a floor polish, ...) -- like how Blockchain became such a darling for several years.

My money's on mRNAI/ML.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#13

Post by cblconfederate »

eplanit wrote: post #7
andy_ppp wrote: post #2

How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?

I predict that mRNA is going to be an obnoxious fad, where every marketer on the planet tries to leverage the concept/acronym/terminology into their product packaging (regardless of whether it's a medicine, a car part, a floor polish, ...) -- like how Blockchain became such a darling for several years.

unlike other fads though this works. TBH i don't think it s going to be limited to RNA, DNA is already a major target especially after CRISPR.

It's been 6 years since the CRISPR breakthroughs , how are we doing on that front?

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#15

Post by Scoundreller »

eplanit wrote: post #7
andy_ppp wrote: post #2

How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?

I predict that mRNA is going to be an obnoxious fad, where every marketer on the planet tries to leverage the concept/acronym/terminology into their product packaging (regardless of whether it's a medicine, a car part, a floor polish, ...) -- like how Blockchain became such a darling for several years.

I recently bought gluten-free bubble bath. Didn’t realize people were eating the stuff.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#16

Post by i_haz_rabies »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #4
andy_ppp wrote: post #2

How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?

This is exactly the kind of gene you wouldn't want to spread "horizontally" on its own, just like antibiotic resistance among bacteria. On the other hand, it hasn't, so far. It does exist in nature, and still doesn't pop up anywhere. Plants also haven't evolved this functionality on their own. There are evolutionary drawbacks to uncontrolled growth, and most plants have their growth "tuned" well below what would be t…

The problem is that if we introduce it, it might take a while for those evolutionary pressures to show up. Uncontrolled growth isn't an immediate pressure, it kicks in after the damage has already been done.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#17

Post by spywaregorilla »

ch4s3 wrote: post #8
tobmlt wrote: post #6

How about nutrient content by mass, or some such measure? I skimmed the article, maybe I missed it. Aside: How easy is it to break into computational biology as a, say, practitioner of computational mechanics?

It's probably about the same, it seems like the change is producing larger more robust plants which yield more. It doesn't seem like that should either the size of the rice grain itself or the nutrient content.

I don't think that's a safe assumption at all. In fact unless it's somehow increasing the rate of nutrient intake, doesn't that all but guarantee the nutrients are being used to make the base plant larger rather than going into the rice?

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#18

Post by dekhn »

tobmlt wrote: post #6

How about nutrient content by mass, or some such measure? I skimmed the article, maybe I missed it. Aside: How easy is it to break into computational biology as a, say, practitioner of computational mechanics?

it's not. you must relearn everything more or less from scratch.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#20

Post by stonemetal12 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #2

How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?

If I had to guess I would say dramatically larger plants require dramatically more nutrition. It will probably be a net negative outside highly fertilized industrial farming scenarios, preventing it from spreading far in nature.
Post reply on HN