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

sciencedaily.com

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

#91

Post by db48x »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #71
pharke wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this process is simple to scale then we absolutely do need it. There is little chance of us fixing our food waste problem and increasing the efficiency of foreign aid in a timely manner. If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use. I'm assuming that we'd aim for making these modified plants easily available…

> If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use. That's not going to happen. People that desperately need the food don't have a problem of not growing enough rice or potatoes because of the nature of the crop. It's not why they are hungry. It's any other reason, politics, weather, logistics, economics, you name i…

I agree that patents on this are likely to stifle most of the advantages, but not that this would create more problems than solutions.

For one thing, it greatly changes the calculus of a Mars mission. A long–term Mars mission needs food, and growing that food on Mars seems like an obvious choice at first glance. But reliably growing food on Mars requires some fairly sophisticated technology: LED lighting, fine automatic control of atmospheric gasses (otherwise the O₂ from the plants would rapidly become a huge fire risk), similar for the water, refrigeration, and an extra large power plant to run it all. Up until now it looked like it would be cheaper to make regular shipments of food and water from Earth to Mars than it would be to make regular shipments of spare parts to keep all of that machinery working. A 50% increase in calories per square foot means that you only need 67% as much machinery, and therefore only 67% as many spare parts.

Even if this created no other benefits, which I find hard to believe, it would be worth it just for a successful Mars mission.

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

#92

Post by tobmlt »

CrimpCity wrote: post #24
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?

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 a…

Thank you for the info depth response. I am credentialed and experienced at picking up things across domains so I might kick it around a bit - as far as it dove tails with computational quantum mechanics at least.

Could be interesting to look at the interface between quantum and classical chemistry… …And look at the interface between molecular dynamics and continuum FEM.

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

#93

Post by jessaustin »

naasking wrote: post #86
jessaustin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating new varieties is the obvious way to "avoid a monoculture".

The incentives under capitalism don't work well in that scenario though. If a variety is much better than alternatives, it will dominate and thus create a monoculture. Same thing we saw with PPE at the beginning of COVID. Capitalist price optimization drove outsourced manufacturing which works great... Until it doesn't. Incentivizing against monoculture has to be explicit.

That will be a great argument when one of these new varieties is, say 5% of world cultivation of any particular crop. We are decades away from that circumstance. This isn't even a slippery slope argument; it's more of a "moderately smooth horizontal plane" argument. Given the challenges that humanity currently faces, these sorts of low-effort Chicken Little objections would endanger millions of human lives, if anyone took them seriously.

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

#94

Post by naasking »

jessaustin wrote: post #93
naasking wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives under capitalism don't work well in that scenario though. If a variety is much better than alternatives, it will dominate and thus create a monoculture. Same thing we saw with PPE at the beginning of COVID. Capitalist price optimization drove outsourced manufacturing which works great... Until it doesn't. Incentivizing against monoculture has to be explicit.

That will be a great argument when one of these new varieties is, say 5% of world cultivation of any particular crop. We are decades away from that circumstance. This isn't even a slippery slope argument; it's more of a "moderately smooth horizontal plane" argument. Given the challenges that humanity currently faces, these sorts of low-effort Chicken Little objections would endanger millions of human lives, if anyone…

Producing enough food is not a challenge humanity faces. We have more than enough food. Distribution is the problem.

Monocultural has also been a problem many times in the past, so calling it a "chicken little" objection is disingenuous.

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

#95

Post by idroveatrain »

bullfightonmars wrote: post #60
necovek wrote: post #21

While 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.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

So there are at least 3 studies performed by different teams in this article that indicates you're incorrect in your assertions as applied in practice.

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

#96

Post by BiteCode_dev »

db48x wrote: post #91
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use. That's not going to happen. People that desperately need the food don't have a problem of not growing enough rice or potatoes because of the nature of the crop. It's not why they are hungry. It's any other reason, politics, weather, logistics, economics, you name i…

I agree that patents on this are likely to stifle most of the advantages, but not that this would create more problems than solutions. For one thing, it greatly changes the calculus of a Mars mission. A long–term Mars mission needs food, and growing that food on Mars seems like an obvious choice at first glance. But reliably growing food on Mars requires some fairly sophisticated technology: LED lighting, fine automa…

Oh sure, I don't say to toss the tech on the trash. I'm just saying it won't solve world food current problems.

Although I'm skeptical for mars, bigger plants will deplete their substrate very fast, it could be a limiter.

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

#97

Post by deltasixeight »

babatuba wrote: post #63
bullfightonmars wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sorry what!? This is how everything works. If you force something to use more ingredients/nutrients/whatever at a faster pace, you will deplete something else in the ecosystem faster than previously. Plants or otherwise: when you force the balance to tilt one way, you have to be extremely careful not to reach a breaking point. Just want to add that I think the technology could be really beneficial though. For ins…

>If you force something to use more ingredients/nutrients/whatever at a faster pace, you will deplete something else in the ecosystem faster than previously.

This is exactly what he is saying. His claim is that carbon is the resource that is depleted faster and that depletion of nutrients in the soil will remain constant.

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

#98

Post by b112 »

bullfightonmars wrote: post #60
necovek wrote: post #21

While 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.

There have been loads of reports about how crops have fewer nutrients already.

And, for example, there are many trace elements which are not replenished with standard fertilizer.

Selenium is an example here, I think it is the Danish?, which have a law now, forcing it to be added to fertilizer.

Bacteria don't make elements.... although I suppose they could free them from rocks...

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

#99

Post by ravenstine »

necovek wrote: post #21

While 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…

It makes me wonder if we aren't using human waste properly.

I'm being serious.

We don't absorb all of the nutrients and calories that we consume, partly because we are overnourished (our bodies might spontaneously combust if we utilized every single calorie we ate), so there's plenty of leftovers in our feces. Does it ever get recycled for use in agriculture in "developed" nations? (I can't think of a word for that which isn't now a faux pas)

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

#100

Post by phonethrowaway »

ravenstine wrote: post #99
necovek wrote: post #21

While 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…

It makes me wonder if we aren't using human waste properly. I'm being serious. We don't absorb all of the nutrients and calories that we consume, partly because we are overnourished (our bodies might spontaneously combust if we utilized every single calorie we ate), so there's plenty of leftovers in our feces. Does it ever get recycled for use in agriculture in "developed" nations? (I can't think of a word for that w…

humanure is a thing
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