Slashdot Mirror
GM Rice Passes Unexpected Benefits To Weeds
ananyo writes "A genetic-modification technique used widely to make crops herbicide resistant has been shown to confer advantages on a weedy form of rice, even in the absence of the herbicide. Used in Monsanto's 'Roundup Ready' crops, for example, resistance to the herbicide glyphosate enables farmers to wipe out most weeds from the fields without damaging their crops. A common assumption has been that if such herbicide resistance genes manage to make it into weedy or wild relatives, they would be disadvantageous and plants containing them would die out. But the new study led by Lu Baorong, an ecologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, challenges that view: it shows that a weedy form of the common rice crop, Oryza sativa, gets a significant fitness boost from glyphosate resistance, even when glyphosate is not applied. The transgenic hybrids had higher rates of photosynthesis, grew more shoots and flowers and produced 48 — 125% more seeds per plant than non-transgenic hybrids — in the absence of glyphosate, the weedkiller they were resistant to."
Genetically modifying plants and then letting them "run wild" in nature. What could possible go wrong. Wasn't this a horror movie or an Itchy & Scratchy episode?
Who is Monsanto going to sue over this??
Which means that it's very likely that in the presence of glyphosate their yield will drop.
Which means glyphosate is acting on other biological pathways we still do not yet understand.
And yet we still consider this stuff to be safe to use.
I'd rather just use bacillus thuringiensis.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"A common assumption has been that if such herbicide resistance genes manage to make it into weedy or wild relatives, they would be disadvantageous and plants containing them would die out. "
...errr....don't you mean...not die out? And isn't the story here that a presumed barrier was crossed, not that it was a good thing...to some?
A common assumption has been that if such herbicide resistance genes manage to make it into weedy or wild relatives, they would be disadvantageous and plants containing them would die out.
Who made that assumption? The genes are good for the plants we go out of our way to keep alive but the ones we have trouble killing off would somehow have a problem with them?
Weird. Who could have foreseen that?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
The headline is outright wrong and misleading. The headline implies that GM rice is passing the trait onto weeds. That is not the case here. The study has nothing to do with whether or not the traits can get passed to weeds from GM rice. The study is not saying that GM rice passed anything along to weeds. It is saying that when intentionally GM'd, the weeds get benefits other than just glyphosate resistance. The stated conclusion of the article is that if the trait got into the weed it would be bad. Duh. The thing that makes the study a bit interesting is that it challenges a previous assumption regarding why it would be bad.
"Feed me, Seymour!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I guess the domestic security state is unstoppable too, right? Why don't you just roll over now - oh wait..
I don't like Monsanto any more than you do, but you are simply projecting.
The article says this appears to be better for the weeds. It does not say this is a Generally Good Thing(TM).
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
A common assumption has been that if such herbicide resistance genes manage to make it into weedy or wild relatives, they would be disadvantageous and plants containing them would die out.
Why would resistance to herbicide be disadvantageous? Obviously it might turn out to be, but why would anyone just assume that? If anything I would be tempted to assume the opposite.
So in short....Don't dare to f*** with nature...
As humans it is what we are best at. If you look at how dominant our species has been graphed with how much we fuck with nature, there is a pretty strong correlation.
I am not saying we should fuck with nature every chance we get, but rather that we should keep trying to do it in a way that is for our own good, rather than in ways that might cause us to get fucked back.
The problem starts when weeds start to "learn" from their GM "friends" how to survive herbicides, which makes your herbicides quite ineffective.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On behallf of Monsanto let me say, "Tough shit!"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
in short....Don't dare to f*** with nature..
That boat sailed a long time ago (I say, posting from an air-conditioned office, built on land that was reclaimed from the sea).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
1. Read an interesting article on GMO rice.
2. Totally botch the summary.
3. Even further botch the headline.
4. Submit to Slashdot.
5. ????
6. Your work is on the front page of Slashdot!!
High Times (a pot mag) reported last century about a 'naturally' occurring RoundUp-resistant cocaine plant.
The US sprayed indiscriminately in Colombia and a few plants survived and passed on the trait.
Evolution happens.
For the folks who hate Monsanto, the difference between a GMO Franken-plant and a regular, sexually-modified plant is a matter of years or decades, nothing else.
But for Monsanto or Congress to expect natural selection to restrict itself to human needs seems bizarrely optimistic given the rest of evolutionary history.
Or wipes out competing plants entirely. I read a book last month by Paolo Bacigalupi called The Windup Girl which involved a world where multinational conglomerates owned the genetic codes for engineered plants, and engineered plants were all that was left.
Pretty scary that things are getting even this close to that.
I heartily expect the GMO, patent encumbered rice will be rejected all over. Nothing says "our rice will weed out your rice and sue you into slavery" quite like this.
How far is it necessary to go before the "weedy" rice plants become a food source?
As far as they went to get the domesticated rice. Asian rice is Oryza sativa. The weedy rice they're talking about is a subspecies, Oryza sativa f. spontanea, that degenerated from the cultivated rice. So if you got the weedy rice to be a food source, all you'd get is what we already have as a food source.
That's not necessarily a fitness boost.
By analogy, having the genes that let you become a top athlete isn't a fitness boost either, otherwise we'd all have them by now.
Monsanto can just sue the weeds for copyright infringement. Problem solved. ;)
Whoa, I missed that from the summary initially - this is NOT the foreign "glyphosphate resistant" bacterial version of the gene they're talking about here.
This sort of thing ("gene duplication" mutations) can happen naturally - it sounds like this exact variety of "GM Rice" COULD have been produced by natural "traditional" methods (it would have taken much longer and been much more expensive in labor, of course). This says more about the potential for "weed" varieties of Oryzae sativa to mutate to be more prolific than anything to do with glyphosphate resistance being beneficial to weeds outside of cultivated fields.
(Also, as stenvar pointed out in another comment, having "higher rates of photosynthesis, [growing] more shoots and flowers and producing 48-125% more seeds per plant" is not necessarily an evolutionary benefit if the resulting increased growth, for example, made the weeds more sensitive to drought or more attractive to herbivorous insects or something of the sort)
Not that it's unreasonable to hypothesize that "weedy" varieties of the rice plant would get a similar boost from having more EPSP Synthase expressed regardless of the reason, but there's also no guarantee that the result will hold when the "extra" enzyme is a version from a different species (as happens with "Roundup-Ready" plants)
I would be interested in seeing this experiment repeated for other common crops that have glyphosphate-resistant versions, it could be useful to know if this affects anything besides rice (and whether this effect could be useful if intentionally added to crop varieties, for that matter.)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Did you know that truckers have to buy a different diesel fuel than non-commercial drivers? It's more expensive than the regular diesel, the only real difference other than price is the non-commercial has a dye in it so the tax collectors can identify when a driver cheaps out and buys the wrong fuel. This is just an example of where two otherwise identical products are priced differently and are required to be used for different purposes
Want to buy the cheapest diesel ?
Try home-heating fuel oil
They are heavily subsidized for home owners to heat their house during winter, and the only difference in between the home-heating fuel oil and the on-road diesel is that the on-road diesel has most of the sulfur removed
Back in the 1980's a group of Russians was raking in truckloads of money by selling home-heating fuel oils in gas stations they own, in New Jersey
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
futile
- Space 1999
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This is actually bad news for Monsanto. It means that farmers will be fighting weeds that can't be controlled with glyphosate, so they won't be using Roundup to fight them and they won't find RR1 seeds to be a smart buy.
The road to hell is paved with gold... no, that's not right.
The road to hell is paved with unintended consequenses... no that's not it, either.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yes, that sounds right.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Weed with nutritional benefits.
That would be a twofer twofer.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Democrats tax weeds, while Republicans make you pay royalties on weeds. Your pocket is emptied either way.
(Although one tends to flow to the poor, the other to the rich.)
Table-ized A.I.
No text
From TFA: “The traditional expectation is that any sort of transgene will confer disadvantage in the wild in the absence of selection pressure, because the extra machinery would reduce the fitness,” says Norman Ellstrand, a plant geneticist at the University of California in Riverside.
Well, that seems like a foolish expectation. These modifications aren't already common in the wild, therefore they must be disadvantageous? This seems to be assuming that evolution has already made these plants as fit as they are going to get, and can't possibly be altered in a way that might make them more so (regardless of whether the alteration has any desirable side-effects). To me, it seems pretty stupid to assume that evolution has somehow peaked, for *any* species, given the time scales, diversity and mechanisms involved.
It's not often I come away from an article like this thinking "those stupid scientists, this is clearly wrong because of X", because normally they've been looking at it for a lot longer than I have and there is something (often a whole wealth of things) I don't understand or am not aware of. But in this case - those stupid scientists, this is clearly wrong because evolution will keep going unless we somehow eliminate all natural sources of genetic mutation.
BT is not an insecticide. BT is just a bacteria? So you are essentially covering your plants with a predatory infection.
Only heartier, more prolific and already resistant to roundup.
Learn to love Alaska