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."
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.
I fail to see the horror in this. Do you expect that the weedy rice variants are going to become sentient and start killing people or soemthing?
The assumption is that the gene results in changes that are energy unfavorable to the plant (the protection against glyphosate is presumably not free, requiring the production of extra proteins or something. I'm not a biologists, not sure how the resistance works). This energy deficit in herbicide resistant weeds means they will naturally be selected against, without exposure to the herbicide. This is the case for bacteria and anti-biotic resistance (at least in most cases). Turns out, in this case, the gene has beneficial side effects, even if the resistance itself is not (absent the herbicide).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Weird. Who could have foreseen that?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
The notion was that traits like glyphosate resistance bear a certain cost which would be why they haven't arisen naturally and been preserved. This can be seen in antibiotic resistance in bacteria, though even there it takes many, many generations for this to sort itself out.
So, if genes cross into wild plants, the idea was that they'd cause the "contaminated" wild plants to be losers, which would self-limit the propagation of such genes in the wild. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be the case: the genes that cause glyphosate resistance are actually a win-win for the plants receiving them, meaning that they'll have a competitive advantage even without glyphosate artificially putting selection pressure on them, which means the genes will actively spread in wild plants due to natural selection.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
...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?
Nope. Hybridization is incredibly common amongst plants, so everyone who has ever given GMOs any thought has known all along that the genes would get loose. I've posted about this on /. and elsewhere for years, and presumably others have too.
The important story is that the GMO/hybrids are seeing some selective advantage, which is what people are surprised at: the assumption was that since these genes do not occur in these plants in nature, the odds of them conferring any selective advantage were extremely low. It would be like any random mutation: billions-to-one odds against being beneficial, because there are billions of ways of screwing up the molecular machinery of the cell and only a few ways of making it better (in part because organisms are by definition pretty well adapted to their environment in almost all cases... if they weren't they would have been out-competed by their better-adapted cousins.
I'm not opposed to GMOs as such, because it is stupid to be opposed to an abstraction as diverse as "GMO"--it would be like being opposed to "nuclear power", say, because one particular type of reactor has proven to be uneconomic. But putting responsibility for GMOs into the hands of a small number of global agri-corps seems to me a fairly bad idea because they are going to downplay the risks posed by the genes getting loose, be more concerned with deploying organisms that are profitable rather than sustainable (Roundup Ready plants are a good example of something I'm very leery of.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"Feed me, Seymour!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I fail to see the horror in this.
If you were a farmer faced with a big bill for herbicides and a field full of vigorous weeds that it won't kill after all, you might see the horror.
which means the genes will actively spread in wild plants due to natural selection.
and we've seen how the introduction of rabbits, foxes and other non-naturally-occurring animals into australia worked out, and how japanese bind weed has worked out when introduced outside of japan.
i cannot begin to voice how insanely dangerous it is to put random genes into food crops like this. the nightmare i "made up" one day was these insane "time-bomb" crops, where crops can be planted and grow but the seeds it creates are sterile. "commercially" this is incredibly "valuable" as it allows total control over the supply. now imagine some completely insane person creating "generation" time-bomb seeds, which grow, seed, grow, seed then grow sterile. now imagine _those_ cross-pollenating with wild crops and other species. you'd be looking at a world-wide famine in 5-10 years as the time-bomb gene would be both latent and undetectable.
what really shocked me was that i heard *ten years ago* that time-bomb crops ALREADY EXIST.
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!!
Not to mention monsanto has had the courts rule in their favor that patents follow the genes.
So if these weeds are growing on your property, monsanto can now sue you for illegally obtaining their patented product. it doesn't mater nor do the courts care that it got there by means beyond your control.
There has been one case of Monsanto successfully suing a farmer that wasn't supposed to be growing that strain. He apparently bought it on the open market as feed, not seed, so he paid a lower price. I know it sounds pretty screwed up, but there's a reason they have laws like that. (Greed comes to mind, but there might be others.)
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser It's true, and here's a case if it actually happening.
Monsanto can just sue the weeds for copyright infringement. Problem solved. ;)
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.
For hire.
To be specific, putting responsibility for GMOs in the hands of people *who do not understand natural selection* is a fairly bad idea.
Canola: also not a weed and Roundup Ready canola is a Monsanto product. Monsanto isn't suing people over them having Roundup-resistant weeds. That's not in Monsanto's best interest because they'd have to argue, in court, that genes from their GMO crops are jumping species--what a weapon to give the anti-GMOers.
A weed is just a plant out of place, any plant can be a weed. If you aren't growing Canola and your field is full of glyphosate resistant Canola,you're not going to be happy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Biology.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
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?
Genetic modifcation doesn't bother me as long as it is used properly. Higher yield, disease resistance, better taste even. Not unlike what we have done for thousands of years, just more quickly.
But to do GM in order to make a plant more resistant to a herbicide is asshattery of the stinkiest sort. Putting Roundup ready crops in the field is a first class method of generating weeds that are also Roundup ready. So ten years from now, we'll be making GMO crops resistant to more and more powerful herbicides, and breeding better superweeds. Eventually, we could be spraying Vietnam era herbicides and defoliants.
Oh yeah, and we'll be eating some of it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Actually, it's a fairly unique and problematic situation.In all of the history of agriculture, saving seed from year to year has been the standard practice. Even with proprietary seed, if you could get your strain to cross with the proprietary one, the result was yours.
Meanwhile, the agricultural practices Monsanto has promoted have produced 'superweeds' that are also roundup resistant (funny considering how many times Monsanto has sworn that ONLY their GM technique could produce a roundup ready plant).
The success of agriculture is the proper business and concern of every person on the planet and that easily trumps the business interest of Monsanto.
As for 'agreed', where's the signed contract? Where's the evidence that the plants growing came from any seed under contract?
Meanwhile, the agricultural practices Monsanto has promoted have produced 'superweeds' that are also roundup resistant (funny considering how many times Monsanto has sworn that ONLY their GM technique could produce a roundup ready plant).
You're both right, sort of. The "superweeds" you refer to don't have the gene that makes RR plants RR. Roundup (glyphosate) works by inhibiting a particular enzyme, EPSPS. RR plants are different in that instead of producing that particular enzyme, they produce a different one that fulfills the same function, which glyphosate does not inhibit. Superweeds don't produce that different enzyme, they produce the typical EPSPS, except they produce enough of it so that when it's inhibited by glyphosate there's still enough to survive. They got that way through selection pressure, not from getting the gene from GM plants. Of course, there wouldn't have been that selection pressure without dumping tons of roundup on crops, and there wouldn't be dumping lots of roundup on crops if those crops weren't Roundup Ready, so that's why I say you're both sort of right.
And, remember that the GM revolution was publicized like this: "we will alter the DNA so we will make species that are resistant to *parasites* so there will be less need to spray the fields with chemicals".
Instead we end up spraying the fields with chemicals that are even more harmful to natural species (you know, the ones you can freely plant with leftover seeds instead of bending over to patented sterile offerings).
Best scam of the century, even better than the "oh you want to get porn or cute cat pictures online? let us control your data and activity instead" internet.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
No, what I remember is that the farmers defense was that the farmer didn't want a resistant crop, and never sprayed the crop with roundup (so no selective breeding occurred), and was just caused by cross breading from the neighbors crops pollen. Monsanto tested his "first" generation crop, and found nearly 100% of the resulting plants to be resistant. Monsanto's claim, backed by science showing it to be nearly impossible (1 in billion chance.) That cross pollination without generations of selective breeding couldn't produce anything close to a 100% resistant seed stock. So Monsanto never claimed that their technique was the only way, they proved that without intent, you couldn't have a 100% resistant crop occur naturally in 1 generation from non RR stock.
Gee. Maybe genetic modification is not about changing the genes of a species.
Maybe it is about changing the genes in an ecosystem.
Could it be that living things do not respect the abstract categories like "species" that genetic engineers use to partition their imaginations?
Will
No. Monnsanto threw a bunch of jargon at some judges that left them convinced that there was evidence of a science-like nature that there was only a 1 in a billion chance.
Since then, volunteer canola has been found growing wild and expressing the RR trait along with traits from other varieties. They also failed to account for the possibility that the RR crop had some other positive trait that Schmeiser was selecting for in his breeding. Otherwise, since Schmeiser wasn't using roundup, why would he bother with RR crops at all?
What's really comical (in a sad way) is a posting on monsantoblog.com where they report roadside wild canola with 86% expressing GM traits. That is in canola that is not being managed at all.
And as TFA tells us, it might have been advantageous even in the absence of roundup (150% more seed for instance would tend to make it dominate the saved seed in a short time). Meanwhile, on appeal even the courts agreed that he really hadn't benefited from the roundup resistance of the crop and so awarded Monsanto nothing.
Probably closer to the truth is that neither the farmer nor Monsanto know how the gene got there. Much like Monsanto has no idea how their experimental GM wheat somehow 'escaped' containment and came to be growing in our food supply. However, one answer would be if the assumption that the GM crop would be at a disadvantage in the absence of roundup proved false. According to TFA it is at least proven not necessarily true.
And wipe out your roundup read crop./p