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Radiation-Resistant Plants Could Be Used In Space
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that two decades after the world's largest nuclear disaster, life around Chernobyl continues to adapt, with Chernobyl soya containing significantly different amounts of several dozen proteins, including one protein involved in defending cells from heavy metal and radiation damage. 'One protein is known to actually protect human blood from radiation,' says Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In a study to determine how plants might have adapted to the meltdown, Hajduch's team compared soya grown in radioactive plots near Chernobyl with plants grown about 100 km away in uncontaminated soil. Results from the study suggest that adaptation toward heavy metal stress, protection against radiation damage, and mobilization of seed storage proteins are involved in the plant adaptation mechanism to radioactivity in the Chernobyl region (abstract). Determining how plants coped with life after Chernobyl could help scientists engineer radiation-resistant plants. While few farmers are eager to cultivate radioactive plots on Earth, future interplanetary travelers may one day need to grow crops to withstand space radiation."
Realistically, how was this not blindingly obvious?
If you put a bunch of life forms into a high stress environment, evolution is going to happen quickly. Clearly, the gene for radiation resistance is going to quickly become prevalent in a population exposed to large amounts of radiation....
You're dramatically oversimplifying things. They weren't asking "will life adapt to these conditions?" Since they were studying plants that were growing in the area, they knew that much already. It was indeed blindingly obvious, they did all their experiments on the proof. They were instead asking "HOW did this life adapt." A much much more complex question. Turns out it's not one gene, and it's not even genes that can be lumped as "radiation resistance."
The real article abstract(right here) points out that these plants aren't just adapted to one new stress.
That last stress itself is far from obvious, maybe plant experts would have guessed that would be a problem, but for me at least, I wouldn't have guessed that would be a major problem. But apparently it is, and the plants have overcome it. I would have guessed it would all be DNA damage.
It also points out that of nearly 700 analyzed proteins, nearly 10% were expressed at different levels from I guess an uncontaminated stock. Far from one gene, seventy genes, apparently tweaked in just a few generations, not millions of years. Not blindingly obvious that evolution could work that fast on that many genes. At least not to me. I also have to point out, that as of yet they don't seem to have found any evidence that nature had to redesign any of the existing machinery, it seems rather that it just changed the levels of machinery made. That's far from certain, but it doesn't seem like it modified most of those 70 proteins, just the levels.
I'm willing to bet that even though soybeans are an important crop, we don't know all there is to know about their molecular mechanisms of dealing with any of those three problems. And even if we did, we don't know how evolution is going to co-opt these systems to deal with new challenges. So examining the actual pathways will probably tell us a great deal about which proteins are involved in these pathways, if any are being used for new purposes. We might even be able to use something we learn there in human medicine, the new scientist article mentions one of the proteins protects human blood against radiation, if we find that one protein is really critical to helping the plants cope, maybe a drug can be developed that will increase the activity or abundance in that protein to help with radiation poisoning and maybe even help with cancer.
HOW is extremely complicated, and they're just scratching the surface. It's fascinating, though not so much that I'm going to spend 30 dollars to read the article right now.