RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
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Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#2How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#3Interestingly this gene, FTO, is also known as the “fat gene” in humans too. Must be something fairly fundamental in growth/proliferation.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#4How 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 theoretically possible given their light and nutrient conditions.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#5How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?
I think that'd be unlikely - there was a massive evolutionary benefit for the plant to produce the amount of carbohydrate stores that the plant naturally makes. If it'd been more beneficial to produce more carbs, the plant would already.
I think a more likely question is what about nutrient density? Making more carbs, in a sense, is easy. Sunlight + CO2 == carbs. Nutrients are more stringently limited by the mineral properties of the soil. This just shoves into our food more calories we don't need diluting the nutrients we do.
Unless their plan is to make cheap, tasteless, vodka and sake
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#6How 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?
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#7How 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.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#8How 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.
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#9How does this impact the soil?
Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
#10How 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.
Classic hype cycle. We've seen mRNA can do one thing really well, now it will be suggested to do everything. It will be a few years before we have a clear picture.