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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....
Somewhere, Darwin smiles quietly.
Cemil.
What about past interplanetary travelers? Will you not help them? Or are you so biased towards the entropic arrow of time, that you refuse to help those poor interplanetary travelers of the past? You Bastards! How do you sleep at night?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It beats bacterium gruel 24/7. Of course, you'd still need to do something about the less than radiation resistant astronauts. I suppose it would be much easier to shield a small habitation pod, than to shield a greenhouse, so that would probably be doable.
It would be interesting, though, to know how difficult it would be to produce human populations with various useful astronaut properties. Unfortunately, most of what you would want to do would involve running right over the medical ethics cliff and into some dubious stuff. You'd pretty much want a bunch of dwarves(transporting mass out of a gravity well is very expensive) with slow metabolisms(ditto) and high radiation tolerance and possibly some sort of Myostatin related mutation that would allow them to preserve muscle mass in low gravity. I can't think of any sort of genetic engineering or selective breeding that would achieve that end, without getting into rather dubious ground.
This may be needed planet-side on occasion, as well, since not all planetary bodies we might consider as a home have the same aggressive magnetosphere that our own homeworld does: Mars has no better than a patchwork magnetosphere, and what of our own Moon? If we expect to grow plants in "biodomes" for food and use natural sunlight for photosynthesis, then those plants may have to be adapted to accepting something closer to the full brunt of that radiation than they have to endure on the face of this rather well-shielded marble.
I'd rather the space hotel I visit would have adequate shielding, than require radiation resistance plants for it's hydroponic salad.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Many people believe that any radioactive event will render an area lifeless for tens of thousands of years. Similarly, the fear of a "dirty bomb" persists, despite the fact that surviving the initial blast represents less increased risk of cancer than smoking cigarettes or having a poor diet. There would be possibly huge cleanup costs, but probably cheaper than a few weeks in Iraq.
...can I still call dibs on the patent, or did someone else already do it?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Would those be of the Audrey II or Triffid variety? Inquiring extraterrestrial-vegetation-phobics want to know.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
. . . is the next step in this study, I guess. If we were all radiation resistant, we could ditch fossil fuels and switch to nuclear.
Radioactive waste? I eat it for breakfast.
And my stomach functions as a breeder reactor, so my shit can be used to generate even more power.
Top that.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There are no "simple" kinds of life. Dismiss that notion from your mind. It may be what you learnt in school or from popular culture, but it isn't accurate.
Living things everywhere are shaped by evolutionary pressures. The niches they occupy and the threats they face differ, so too do the mechanisms by which they adapt. But from a basic level, there are no orders of lesser to greater life, except those that exist in our collective imagination.
Life does not become more advanced. It becomes better adapted to the challenges. "Survival of the fittest" here means fit in the sense of adapted, not "superior" (which is one reason why the phrase is rarely used by people who know the subject well).
Bigger life forms may be more complex in the sense of having more parts, or possessing intelligence, but they are not more advanced in any meaningful way. Culturally, we draw a distinction between intelligent and unintelligent life, but intelligence itself is simply another survival mechanism. One that we value as a species, but for reasons unrelated to survival itself.
The reason the smallest living things adapt swiftly to new threats like ionizing radiation has to with reproductive span. The faster you breed, the more quickly you can adapt. Larger forms of life breed, and therefor adapt, more slowly. So in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster (or war), the first to recover are naturally the smallest, but not because they are any simpler.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Depends on what the opposite is.
Simple versus advanced, which is the way most people use the word, is plainly wrong when talking about biology. The myth of the "higher" and "lower" forms of life is one that persists in the public consciousness, but it's been rejected in scientific circles for the better part a century.
Simple versus complex is a slightly different story. You can describe a multi-cellular organism as more complex in biological terms than a single-celled one in the same way you can say a personal computer is more complex than a single microchip. In those cases, complexity is a shorthand way of referring to the number of "parts" involved, be those parts organ systems or machine components.
It's still not the preferred way of distinguishing the two, owing to the confusion it causes. When a biologist says "simple" people take it for granted that the opposite is "advanced", which is wrong.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.