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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."
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.
Who is Monsanto going to sue over this??
Why would you assume Monsanto doesn't like this news? If the resistance in weeds won't naturally die out over time, that means glyphosate will become less effective over time even if it stops being used. Since Monsanto's patents don't last forever (yet), that means they can develop and patent a new genetic modification and herbicide (and the "process" of using one with the other, because that is apparently inventive all in itself) that will be required once glyphosate loses its effectiveness. If glyphosate didn't lose it's effectiveness, people would just keep using that after Monsanto lost their monopoly.
In fact, I wouldn't be terribly surprised, given Monsanto's history, to find out they already knew about this "problem." Maybe even planned it that way.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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 glyphosate is acting on other biological pathways we still do not yet understand.
Manure acts on biological pathways we do not understand, and some of the ways it does act are known to be dangerous. Yet it's a fully organic fertilizer.
In biology, if you wait until you know everything, then nothing will ever get done. Sometimes you just have to narrow down the risk to as small as possible. In the case of Roundup, a lot of studies have been done testing the danger to human health, and it seems to be no more dangerous than manure.
"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!!
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.
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
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.
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.