7 ms·

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

215 points by thomasweiser 5y ago

andy_ppp 5y ago
How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  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.
  - i_haz_rabies 5y ago
    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.
- sfasf 5y ago
  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
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    That's the thing that gets me about the idea that the world needs more food. Yes, people are better off being fed rather than not in countries where food is scarce. Better yielding crops are great for this. Should "developed" nations end up relying on rapidly growing crops that are selected for macronutrients (or perhaps just calories) at the expense of micronutrients? In my uncommon opinion, the answer is a likely no given that we generally eat way more than is necessary and at the expense of our long term health. The only way I can see it being beneficial in places like the United States is if it allowed individuals to grow their own food faster, cheaper, and more easily. But then we will likely implement regulations to discourage people from growing their own food. But that's pure speculation.
- eplanit 5y ago
  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.
  - comicjk 5y ago
    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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    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.
  - politician 5y ago
    My money's on mRNAI/ML.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    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?
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    I recently bought gluten-free bubble bath. Didn’t realize people were eating the stuff.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Surely you've seen skin-based allergy tests. Allergies don't just affect the digestive system.
  - 5y ago
- stonemetal12 5y ago
  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.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    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.
- Integrape 5y ago
  I hope it's dangerous enough that it ends up creating ninja turtles, but not enough to bring dinosaurs back from extinction.
virtuallynathan 5y ago
Interestingly this gene, FTO, is also known as the “fat gene” in humans too. Must be something fairly fundamental in growth/proliferation.
tobmlt 5y ago
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?
- ch4s3 5y ago
  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.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    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?
    - necovek 5y ago
      The abstract mentions how it leads to longer roots ("produced longer root systems"), which is probably the explanation for all the properties (it can extract water from deeper soil, and it can extract more nutrients from the soil). My concern is how many generations of crops can one have in such a field before it needs artificial replenishing in the ways we do not do today (see my longer comment elsewhere on the thread :)).
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    larger plants means less plants per square meter, no ?
- dekhn 5y ago
  it's not. you must relearn everything more or less from scratch.
- CrimpCity 5y ago
  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.
9qlGq9aGgQMgaax 5y ago
How does this impact the soil?
- elevaet 5y ago
  This could benefit the soil as less land will be needed to produce the same amount of food. This would allow more land to lie dormant with nitrogen fixing plants, allowing wider periods between crop rotations. The deeper roots could also benefit the soil. Wild plants tend to have deeper roots, and this brings greater biological activity in the depths of the soil - so more of the soil is 'alive'. These deep-rooted plants are hardier, so less pesticides will be needed, which also benefits the soil. And on the same note they will need less chemical fertilizer because they can access more nutrients from the depths. Again, good for the soil. On the other hand, if these crops are farmed overly intensely, they will just end up depleting the soil to a greater physical dept, so we'll be back at the same problem, but deeper. But in the meantime, at least we'll have crops that are accessing more soil volume.
LightG 5y ago
Coming soon ... "RNA breakthrough revolutionises the porn industry"
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  How though? I'm intrigued.
  - naasking 5y ago
    Real tentacle monsters.
  - aurizon 5y ago
    More, larger, breasts, dicks etc. Get a date with 6 Breasted Annie(TM), or Double Dick Dan(TM). Possibilities endless in terms of body mods, repugnant as it sounds - it may come to pass.....
necovek 5y ago
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 naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations). Sure, rotation of cultures is already common in farming, but this implies we'd move further away from organic farming rather than closer to it with the need to re-fertilize the soil to an even bigger extent (and deeper). Or, it would make us move to other currently unexploited land, thus worsening the global situation we are in. Basically, there is a potential in this, but I was never under the impression that any part of human population is starving because of us being unable to produce enough food (rather, it's waste and inequality, to name the likely top two).
- criley2 5y ago
  >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.
- 5y ago
favoritecolor 5y ago
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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9
- gus_massa 5y ago
  They probably used the human version for laziness, because it is probably available on the shelf. If it causes too many problems for the PR department, they can switch to the chimpanzee version, or the mice version. They are very similar (or identical?).
- moses-palmer 5y ago
  And of you would consider it taboo, would you still if the same generic sequence were found in another species?
- hirundo 5y ago
  We share the majority of our genes with other animals and plants. If sharing a gene with humans makes eating it cannibalism it becomes cannibalism to eat almost any living thing. https://www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/473-how-much-dna-do-plants-share-with-humans-over-99 https://www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/473-h...
- thomasweiser 5y ago
  https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2021-yu.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2021-yu.pdf
devchix 5y ago
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!
- taneq 5y ago
  The last few years I've been noticing the weird plastic tomatoes a lot. I don't know what they've done to them but they last for ages in the fridge and they taste like cardboard. I tend to go for the truss tomatoes because they're a bit more like actual tomatoes.
- deepGem 5y ago
  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 could just eat the red onion without a drop of tear in my eyes. Try doing this in India. So those in US, if at all you ever feel like eating real vegetables hop on a 15 hour flight to Delhi or Bangalore :)
  - s5300 5y ago
    This is one of my points for people who gripe so much about California. There is absolutely nowhere else in the U.S. where you can go just about anywhere and get fresh, cheap, properly flavorful produce. Even several capitol cities of MidWest states don't have a real competitor to what's widely available and affordable in Cali.
Ericson2314 5y ago
I wish every time this sort of thing is tried, they would do it with the perennial versions too. Surely some ultra hot-rodded perennial strain would eventually catch up with the old commercial variety? But when both are getting more productive, how could the perennial one ever catch up? Also, just as we must demand we should reduce working hours with labor productivity improvements, we should also demand that we reduce farmland with crop productivity improvements. The market can never do this on it's own, it must be externally imposed.
naasking 5y ago
Optimizing yield often sacrifices resilience in other ways. Let's also avoid a monoculture.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Creating new varieties is the obvious way to "avoid a monoculture".
  - naasking 5y ago
    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.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      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.
      - naasking 5y ago
        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.
        jessaustin 5y ago
        There are lots of hungry people, in lots of places. Please have some sympathy for their plight. Capitalists tell us that they can properly distribute the food produced in a few nations to everywhere, but they have so far largely failed to do so. Invariably capitalists and their useful idiots invoke "market failures" as reasons for capitalist-owned politicians to take even more freedoms from producers and consumers than they've already taken. It beggars belief to complain about a strictly hypothetical "monoculture" (resulting from new crop varieties!) when giant firms like Cargill, Tyson, JBS, etc. control so much of our society. It has in most cases been far more reliable, resilient, nutritious, environmentally benign, and just to produce and consume food locally, rather than burning fuel to ship it around the world while it's still edible. We put up with lots of externalities from agriculture, because it's important that humans have food to eat. We can't dismiss completely benign ag tech out of hand, for essentially religious reasons. I make no particular claim for these particular crop varieties, but your objections are ridiculous. You're simply wrong about this, and it's not "disingenuous" to say so.
cheese_goddess 5y ago
It's amazing to me that people are still claiming to do beneficial work when they work on improving yields or size in this case. The amount of food (let alone the size of vegetables) we produce is already enough to feed everyone, but we throw away at least a third of the food we produce (the internet is full of references for that) instead of distributing it fairly where it is needed the most (one part of the world is obese, another is malnourished). It is clear beyond doubt that the real difficulty we're facing with food production is to sensibly set the limits of supply, so that excesses are avoided and to organise distribution so that everyone has as much as they need. Larger vegetables are not really a problem in the real world. As to resistance to drought, while we're already in the shit for good with the amount of warming expected in the next decades, the root of the problem is not that our vegetables can't handle drought, it's that we have continue to fuck the environment and destabilise the ability of the planet to feed us. Solve this problem and stop faffing about with irrelevant bullshit.
imwillofficial 5y ago
And there will be no downstream consequences we discover 59 years from now… Like monasto pesticides causing cancer.
- Nicksil 5y ago
  >Like monasto pesticides causing cancer. Has this been determined?
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Not conclusively. Some studies find that glyphosate causes increased incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma [0], although most environment regulators have minimized these results. Anecdotally, in my hometown, of the two men who over the last several decades personally have applied the most glyphosate (although, to be fair, most other herbicides as well), one is already dead before his time from cancer and the other's health is failing. Humans shouldn't die painfully in their 50s. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383574218300887 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      It's worth noting that the chemical companies have long histories of inventing a new kind of poison and then covering up what it does to humans so that it takes decades to figure it out. Such was the case with DDT. https://groovyhistory.com/silent-spring-rachel-carson-ddt https://groovyhistory.com/silent-spring-rachel-carson-ddt
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    Can’t tell, monasto and folks keep settling
    - timbit42 5y ago
      Sounds like a yes.
aurizon 5y ago
Like anything gene based, it can be used for good/evil. That said, it has great potential for good - with full knowledge and regulation. I can recall the old Disney cartoon of the lazy sorcerers apprentice on youtube. For example, something that ate chlorophyll getting loose in the oceans - call it chlorophage - the end of all sea plants that use chlorophyll..
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Growing more food can alleviate the distribution problem. At some point folks can grow their own, becoming less dependent on the politics of distribution. Its not reasonable to dismiss this because 'we just have to distribute food better'. That's not been solved, with decades of trying. But eating local can be a bigger part of a real solution. And this discovery makes that 50% more effective, which is huge.
- pjc50 5y ago
  The politics of land distribution are even worse, with the added problem of being much more permanent.
neltnerb 5y ago
There's a link to the original press release. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/rna-breakthrough-crops-grow-50-percent-more-potatoes-rice-climate-change https://news.uchicago.edu/story/rna-breakthrough-crops-grow-... And the actual article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9
a9h74j 5y ago
Props to everyone here wondering about soil. Speaking from the old school where fossil fuel, aquifer, and soil depletion are certain to kick in at scale within this century.
aaron695 5y ago
The comments here are fucking inane and answered in the paper / press release. Nutrition is fine, it's been tested. Not that it matters anywhere. The real poor need different nutrition, not more (or less) of the same. And your problem is you'll be to fat, or fine, or need targeted nutrition supplements in a pill under some circumstances like vegan or pregnant or winter in a colder climate. It tastes fine. It's not a Chinese scam (Western uni's were involved) It wrecks the soil is a dumb statement, it improves the soil quality. It's a real carbon sink. Deeper roots also mean big trees in places that were hard before. It's not just potatoes and rice and foods. It might be useful on all types of plants, like drugs, flowers, wood, scents. They just tried rice and potatoes first. The only issue is it's a Noble prizing winning find. Why hasn't it got more press if it's true? This could be because everyone is fucking stupid. Or there's a big catch that no one has mentioned yet. 50/50 on that.
jbverschoor 5y ago
We need more nutrient dense food instead of big food
ip26 5y ago
Forget about yields, increased resilience to drought etc could be the big news if exploited. Deep root systems and resilience could dramatically reduce necessary irrigation & fertilization. Hardy plants need fewer inputs, deeper fertilization means less runoff, and deep irrigation means less evaporation.
rufus_foreman 5y ago
I love how the reaction here to any positive outcome is negative. I'm a recovering doom porn addict but I do still like to watch others indulge.

215 points by thomasweiser 5y ago

andy_ppp 5y ago

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

bayesian_horse 5y ago
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.
- i_haz_rabies 5y ago
  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.
sfasf 5y ago
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
- ravenstine 5y ago
  That's the thing that gets me about the idea that the world needs more food. Yes, people are better off being fed rather than not in countries where food is scarce. Better yielding crops are great for this. Should "developed" nations end up relying on rapidly growing crops that are selected for macronutrients (or perhaps just calories) at the expense of micronutrients? In my uncommon opinion, the answer is a likely no given that we generally eat way more than is necessary and at the expense of our long term health. The only way I can see it being beneficial in places like the United States is if it allowed individuals to grow their own food faster, cheaper, and more easily. But then we will likely implement regulations to discourage people from growing their own food. But that's pure speculation.
eplanit 5y ago
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.
- comicjk 5y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  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.
- politician 5y ago
  My money's on mRNAI/ML.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  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?
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  I recently bought gluten-free bubble bath. Didn’t realize people were eating the stuff.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Surely you've seen skin-based allergy tests. Allergies don't just affect the digestive system.
- 5y ago
stonemetal12 5y ago
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.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  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.
Integrape 5y ago
I hope it's dangerous enough that it ends up creating ninja turtles, but not enough to bring dinosaurs back from extinction.

virtuallynathan 5y ago

Interestingly this gene, FTO, is also known as the “fat gene” in humans too. Must be something fairly fundamental in growth/proliferation.

tobmlt 5y ago

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?

ch4s3 5y ago
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.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  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?
  - necovek 5y ago
    The abstract mentions how it leads to longer roots ("produced longer root systems"), which is probably the explanation for all the properties (it can extract water from deeper soil, and it can extract more nutrients from the soil). My concern is how many generations of crops can one have in such a field before it needs artificial replenishing in the ways we do not do today (see my longer comment elsewhere on the thread :)).
- wiz21c 5y ago
  larger plants means less plants per square meter, no ?
dekhn 5y ago
it's not. you must relearn everything more or less from scratch.
CrimpCity 5y ago
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.

9qlGq9aGgQMgaax 5y ago

How does this impact the soil?

elevaet 5y ago
This could benefit the soil as less land will be needed to produce the same amount of food. This would allow more land to lie dormant with nitrogen fixing plants, allowing wider periods between crop rotations. The deeper roots could also benefit the soil. Wild plants tend to have deeper roots, and this brings greater biological activity in the depths of the soil - so more of the soil is 'alive'. These deep-rooted plants are hardier, so less pesticides will be needed, which also benefits the soil. And on the same note they will need less chemical fertilizer because they can access more nutrients from the depths. Again, good for the soil. On the other hand, if these crops are farmed overly intensely, they will just end up depleting the soil to a greater physical dept, so we'll be back at the same problem, but deeper. But in the meantime, at least we'll have crops that are accessing more soil volume.

LightG 5y ago

Coming soon ... "RNA breakthrough revolutionises the porn industry"

vagrantJin 5y ago
How though? I'm intrigued.
- naasking 5y ago
  Real tentacle monsters.
- aurizon 5y ago
  More, larger, breasts, dicks etc. Get a date with 6 Breasted Annie(TM), or Double Dick Dan(TM). Possibilities endless in terms of body mods, repugnant as it sounds - it may come to pass.....

necovek 5y ago

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 naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations). Sure, rotation of cultures is already common in farming, but this implies we'd move further away from organic farming rather than closer to it with the need to re-fertilize the soil to an even bigger extent (and deeper). Or, it would make us move to other currently unexploited land, thus worsening the global situation we are in. Basically, there is a potential in this, but I was never under the impression that any part of human population is starving because of us being unable to produce enough food (rather, it's waste and inequality, to name the likely top two).

criley2 5y ago
>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.
5y ago

favoritecolor 5y ago

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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9

gus_massa 5y ago
They probably used the human version for laziness, because it is probably available on the shelf. If it causes too many problems for the PR department, they can switch to the chimpanzee version, or the mice version. They are very similar (or identical?).
moses-palmer 5y ago
And of you would consider it taboo, would you still if the same generic sequence were found in another species?
hirundo 5y ago
We share the majority of our genes with other animals and plants. If sharing a gene with humans makes eating it cannibalism it becomes cannibalism to eat almost any living thing. https://www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/473-how-much-dna-do-plants-share-with-humans-over-99 https://www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/473-h...
thomasweiser 5y ago
https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2021-yu.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2021-yu.pdf

devchix 5y ago

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!

taneq 5y ago
The last few years I've been noticing the weird plastic tomatoes a lot. I don't know what they've done to them but they last for ages in the fridge and they taste like cardboard. I tend to go for the truss tomatoes because they're a bit more like actual tomatoes.
deepGem 5y ago
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 could just eat the red onion without a drop of tear in my eyes. Try doing this in India. So those in US, if at all you ever feel like eating real vegetables hop on a 15 hour flight to Delhi or Bangalore :)
- s5300 5y ago
  This is one of my points for people who gripe so much about California. There is absolutely nowhere else in the U.S. where you can go just about anywhere and get fresh, cheap, properly flavorful produce. Even several capitol cities of MidWest states don't have a real competitor to what's widely available and affordable in Cali.

Ericson2314 5y ago

I wish every time this sort of thing is tried, they would do it with the perennial versions too. Surely some ultra hot-rodded perennial strain would eventually catch up with the old commercial variety? But when both are getting more productive, how could the perennial one ever catch up? Also, just as we must demand we should reduce working hours with labor productivity improvements, we should also demand that we reduce farmland with crop productivity improvements. The market can never do this on it's own, it must be externally imposed.

naasking 5y ago

Optimizing yield often sacrifices resilience in other ways. Let's also avoid a monoculture.

jessaustin 5y ago
Creating new varieties is the obvious way to "avoid a monoculture".
- naasking 5y ago
  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.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    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.
    - naasking 5y ago
      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.
      - jessaustin 5y ago
        There are lots of hungry people, in lots of places. Please have some sympathy for their plight. Capitalists tell us that they can properly distribute the food produced in a few nations to everywhere, but they have so far largely failed to do so. Invariably capitalists and their useful idiots invoke "market failures" as reasons for capitalist-owned politicians to take even more freedoms from producers and consumers than they've already taken. It beggars belief to complain about a strictly hypothetical "monoculture" (resulting from new crop varieties!) when giant firms like Cargill, Tyson, JBS, etc. control so much of our society. It has in most cases been far more reliable, resilient, nutritious, environmentally benign, and just to produce and consume food locally, rather than burning fuel to ship it around the world while it's still edible. We put up with lots of externalities from agriculture, because it's important that humans have food to eat. We can't dismiss completely benign ag tech out of hand, for essentially religious reasons. I make no particular claim for these particular crop varieties, but your objections are ridiculous. You're simply wrong about this, and it's not "disingenuous" to say so.

cheese_goddess 5y ago

It's amazing to me that people are still claiming to do beneficial work when they work on improving yields or size in this case. The amount of food (let alone the size of vegetables) we produce is already enough to feed everyone, but we throw away at least a third of the food we produce (the internet is full of references for that) instead of distributing it fairly where it is needed the most (one part of the world is obese, another is malnourished). It is clear beyond doubt that the real difficulty we're facing with food production is to sensibly set the limits of supply, so that excesses are avoided and to organise distribution so that everyone has as much as they need. Larger vegetables are not really a problem in the real world. As to resistance to drought, while we're already in the shit for good with the amount of warming expected in the next decades, the root of the problem is not that our vegetables can't handle drought, it's that we have continue to fuck the environment and destabilise the ability of the planet to feed us. Solve this problem and stop faffing about with irrelevant bullshit.

imwillofficial 5y ago

And there will be no downstream consequences we discover 59 years from now… Like monasto pesticides causing cancer.

Nicksil 5y ago
>Like monasto pesticides causing cancer. Has this been determined?
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Not conclusively. Some studies find that glyphosate causes increased incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma [0], although most environment regulators have minimized these results. Anecdotally, in my hometown, of the two men who over the last several decades personally have applied the most glyphosate (although, to be fair, most other herbicides as well), one is already dead before his time from cancer and the other's health is failing. Humans shouldn't die painfully in their 50s. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383574218300887 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    It's worth noting that the chemical companies have long histories of inventing a new kind of poison and then covering up what it does to humans so that it takes decades to figure it out. Such was the case with DDT. https://groovyhistory.com/silent-spring-rachel-carson-ddt https://groovyhistory.com/silent-spring-rachel-carson-ddt
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  Can’t tell, monasto and folks keep settling
  - timbit42 5y ago
    Sounds like a yes.

aurizon 5y ago

Like anything gene based, it can be used for good/evil. That said, it has great potential for good - with full knowledge and regulation. I can recall the old Disney cartoon of the lazy sorcerers apprentice on youtube. For example, something that ate chlorophyll getting loose in the oceans - call it chlorophage - the end of all sea plants that use chlorophyll..

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Growing more food can alleviate the distribution problem. At some point folks can grow their own, becoming less dependent on the politics of distribution. Its not reasonable to dismiss this because 'we just have to distribute food better'. That's not been solved, with decades of trying. But eating local can be a bigger part of a real solution. And this discovery makes that 50% more effective, which is huge.

pjc50 5y ago
The politics of land distribution are even worse, with the added problem of being much more permanent.

neltnerb 5y ago

There's a link to the original press release. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/rna-breakthrough-crops-grow-50-percent-more-potatoes-rice-climate-change https://news.uchicago.edu/story/rna-breakthrough-crops-grow-... And the actual article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9

a9h74j 5y ago

Props to everyone here wondering about soil. Speaking from the old school where fossil fuel, aquifer, and soil depletion are certain to kick in at scale within this century.

aaron695 5y ago

The comments here are fucking inane and answered in the paper / press release. Nutrition is fine, it's been tested. Not that it matters anywhere. The real poor need different nutrition, not more (or less) of the same. And your problem is you'll be to fat, or fine, or need targeted nutrition supplements in a pill under some circumstances like vegan or pregnant or winter in a colder climate. It tastes fine. It's not a Chinese scam (Western uni's were involved) It wrecks the soil is a dumb statement, it improves the soil quality. It's a real carbon sink. Deeper roots also mean big trees in places that were hard before. It's not just potatoes and rice and foods. It might be useful on all types of plants, like drugs, flowers, wood, scents. They just tried rice and potatoes first. The only issue is it's a Noble prizing winning find. Why hasn't it got more press if it's true? This could be because everyone is fucking stupid. Or there's a big catch that no one has mentioned yet. 50/50 on that.

jbverschoor 5y ago

We need more nutrient dense food instead of big food

ip26 5y ago

Forget about yields, increased resilience to drought etc could be the big news if exploited. Deep root systems and resilience could dramatically reduce necessary irrigation & fertilization. Hardy plants need fewer inputs, deeper fertilization means less runoff, and deep irrigation means less evaporation.

rufus_foreman 5y ago

I love how the reaction here to any positive outcome is negative. I'm a recovering doom porn addict but I do still like to watch others indulge.