Original paper linked here (behind paywall) [0]. The researchers introduced the human FTO gene into plants to increase crop yields. Would this be cannibalism? You could use RNA demethylases from other organisms for sure, but it's a really interesting and weird concept, whether people would consider eating a plant expressing human proteins to be taboo. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9
RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
51–60 of 173 posts
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#52Perhaps 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 stor…
You're right, but it is multiple things. These giant foods do lose flavor concentration. Additionally, a lot of these things are not allowed to ripen naturally. They are picked early and put in storage with nitrogen gas to suspend ripening. This is also why produce seems to spoil after 3 days in the fridge. You'll see quite a difference if you can get fresh grown vegetables from your own garden.
I think in the future, a lot of this produce will be grown at home in hydroponics devices. However, the bigger question there is figuring out the color of LED light to still produce a pleasing tomato.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#53How 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.
Weeds somehow manage to become giant and prolific in soil that wouldn't grow any food crops. I don't think we're near any limits of soil or biology with our foods.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Surely you've seen skin-based allergy tests. Allergies don't just affect the digestive system.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
At least IoT seems to have settled a bit so that the things that are still around are often actually pretty useful. I just wish vendors would stop trying to get nontechnical customers to base business-critical systems around cloud-based services. No, your feed bin level should NOT have to get to your dashboard 1km away via a 4G connection, a SIM not under your control, and a vendor's cloud service. Install some fiber or a wireless bridge with a couple of cantennas and then if some goober dredges up an undersea cable or you forget to update your credit card and your subscription fee bounces all your cows don't all die.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#56Perhaps 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 stor…
When I first moved from India to US, this is the first noticeable difference I found. Huge ass veggies, devoid of taste. I just couldn't believe tomatoes. They looked so pretty yet had literally no tart. So yeah I'm cool with all of these RNA fiddling etc but for the love of God, do not turn vegetables into tasteless elements that just look pretty in super market shelves. My real shocker was onion. I mean, man I coul…
> I mean, man I could just eat the red onion without a drop of tear in my eyes. Try doing this in India.
That’s actually to a large degree a soil thing. In US, there are some places where the soil is naturally very low in sulfur, and these places see a lot of onion cultivation, as the resulting produce is much less burning than onion grown elsewhere.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#57While I see people worry about the nutrient content in the resulting food, I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products. While we fertilize the soil, the mention of "longer and deeper roots" means that such plants will take out more from the ground, making ground less usable for future farming. Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not nat…
If the concern is minerals, aren't there rocks in the soil that as they get broken down over time will release minerals? As for non-mineral things like nitrogen, isn't the soil supposed to have an ecosystem that replenishes these things? In healthy soil, there are bacteria, fungus, earthworms, ants etc to make the soil conducive for plant growth. Nature doesn't add artificial chemicals for fertilizer yet left to its…
In nature biomass ends up in roughly the same places so this balances out, with crops farmers are removing significant biomass from farmland. The use of fertilizer is in part a consequence of specific plants depleting soil.
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen which represents the bulk of organic mater is available from air and water, but phosphorus for example gets depleted. Nitrogen fertilizer is something of a special case as extracting it from the atmosphere takes a lot of energy. However, nitrogen fixing bacteria will return it to soil if given time to do so.
The specifics of course get more complicated, sod for example is physically removing layers of soil.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#58While I see people worry about the nutrient content in the resulting food, I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products. While we fertilize the soil, the mention of "longer and deeper roots" means that such plants will take out more from the ground, making ground less usable for future farming. Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not nat…
The initial varieties into which the researchers introduced the FTO gene do not appear to be modern high-performance crops though. They didn't have yields that were already optimized by breeding, so they were easier to get impressive performance gains from. What FTO can achieve in the performance-optimized varieties that farmers grow today remains to be seen in further experiments.
Source: https://heise.de/-6180853 (German)
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#59While I see people worry about the nutrient content in the resulting food, I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products. While we fertilize the soil, the mention of "longer and deeper roots" means that such plants will take out more from the ground, making ground less usable for future farming. Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not nat…
> There's an evolutionary reason why plants do not naturally grow this big.
That could be said of current crops. They are the result of years of artificial selection
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#60While I see people worry about the nutrient content in the resulting food, I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products. While we fertilize the soil, the mention of "longer and deeper roots" means that such plants will take out more from the ground, making ground less usable for future farming. Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not nat…
This is not how plants work. The increased biomass comes from carbon in the air.
There is already more than enough nutrients in the ground or applied as fertilizer. In fact most of the nutrients from fertilizer are lost and wash away.
This will allow plants to capture more applied ferilizer. Mostly though these plants will be pulling more carbon from the atmosphere.