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

I wouldn’t put Blockchain in the past tense here. Having recently conducted a job search in IT, the number of jobs, companies, and startups that are either completely focused on, or at least discussing blockchain is staggering. It’s in the same boat with IoT. With some job descriptions you get both! I can’t roll my eyes hard enough.

There’s a ton of bio specific domain knowledge you’d need to pick up. I haven’t met too many self taught comp bio people I’d imagine it’s the same as the number of self taught computational mechanics people.

From my limited experience (this could def not generalize) the two fields are very different in industry. Comp mech tends to be very design or analysis oriented and hence project management heavy. Generally you already have a product and are trying to refine it in some way. There’s also usually commercially available tools to do advanced FEA. For the most part people aren’t writing their own programs anymore.

Whereas comp bio tends to be more like data science applied to bio so it’s more of a software offshoot where projects feel more like full product development cycles where in some cases people produce software along with a final product. So you also need great coding skills.

Finally most comp bio people have phds. I don’t know if it’s a requirement for a job but that’s what I have seen. This may be a barrier.

To jump straight in could be very hard. Tho there may be other paths for example bioinformatics to learn domain and software then jump into comp bio once you have a base.

There’s also the going back to school option to pick up domain knowledge + credential but I’m generally against it just because of opportunity cost.

Anyway take all this with a grain of salt cause my experience/ what I’ve seen may be way off.

Finally def check out some free comp bio classes. I think Stanford and Berkeley have freely available online materials.

>Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).

The undomesticated cultivars which evolved over time evolved to work in their niche. Potatoes largely come from the Andes in Peru/Chile, where the soil is thin, rocky and the terrain is very mountainous.

So potatoes evolved to develop in poor quality mountainous soil.

What we do as humans in domesticating these cultivars is important because we grow potatoes in very different situations, and we develop new potato cultivar that are adapted to our new environments.

So you see, it's not "an evolutionary reason plants don't grow big", it's "they evolved to fill a niche". When we change the niche, we change the pressures on them, and we create an opportunity for us to adapt the new plant even better.

I don't think there is as much worry about fertilizer as you think. When growing crops we are long past the time when you rely on natural fertilizer. Nearly every atom in those plants that isn't Carbon was added to the soil explicitly to grow that plant. So, to grow bigger potato, you will need more fertilizer.

With regards to climate, being able to grow more rice per acre is valuable because climate change will destroy breadbasket regions and likely reduce total land available to agriculture. Thus maintaining total output levels against decreasing land total will be important.

Perhaps there's a net good application to this, more yield so a plant can produce more, feed more hungry people, survive storage and shipping -- but I see 4lbs packs of Driscoll strawberries at my store, year round. The fruits are gigantic, way bigger than what a strawberry should be, firm, uniformly red, and absolutely tasteless. Same with tomatoes, bananas, potatoes, anything you could buy at a typical grocery store. Especially tomatoes, you can taste what an astounding difference between a commercially produced tomato (even with monikers like vine-ripened, kumato, heirloom, etc.) and an ugly homegrown one. I don't want this future, but my want is at odds with that of the producers: what's wrong with fresh tomatoes and basil year round? and that of the poor: what's wrong with affordable berries, asparagus, good-tasting not-mealy apples?

I remember when honeycrisps first came on the market, they were smaller, now they are gigantic, I don't know if they taste more diluted. I also remember green plumcots, they used to be smaller, more tart and sweet. Now they are huge!

And of you would consider it taboo, would you still if the same generic sequence were found in another species?