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Hybrid Rice Engineered With CRISPR Can Clone Its Seeds (sciencenews.org)
A gene editing technique has been used to produce asexual rice, which could carry traits such as high yields and drought resistance. From a report: After more than 20 years of theorizing about it, scientists have tweaked a hybrid variety of rice so that some of the plants produce cloned seeds. No plant sex necessary. The feat, described earlier this month in Nature, is encouraging for efforts to feed an increasingly crowded world. Crossing two good varieties of grain can make one fabulous one, combining the best versions of genes to give crops desirable traits such as higher yields. But such hybrid grain marvels often don't pass along those coveted genetic qualities to all seeds during reproduction. So farmers who want consistently higher yields have to pay for new hybrid seeds every year.
This new lab version of hybrid rice would preserve those qualities through self-cloning, says study coauthor Venkatesan Sundaresan, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis. Though 400 kinds of plants, including some blackberries and citruses, have developed self-cloning seeds naturally, re-creating those pathways in crop plants has "been harder than anyone expected," Sundaresan says. He and his colleagues got the idea for the new research while studying "how a fertilized egg becomes a zygote, this magical cell that regenerates an entire organism," as Sundaresan puts it. The researchers discovered that modifying two sets of genes caused the japonica rice hybrid called Kitaake to clone its own seeds. First the team found that in a fertilized plant egg, only the male version of a gene called BABY BOOM1 found in sperm triggered the development of a seed embryo. So the scientists inserted a genetic starter switch, called a promoter, that let the female version of the same gene do the same job. No male would be necessary to trigger an embryo's development.
This new lab version of hybrid rice would preserve those qualities through self-cloning, says study coauthor Venkatesan Sundaresan, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis. Though 400 kinds of plants, including some blackberries and citruses, have developed self-cloning seeds naturally, re-creating those pathways in crop plants has "been harder than anyone expected," Sundaresan says. He and his colleagues got the idea for the new research while studying "how a fertilized egg becomes a zygote, this magical cell that regenerates an entire organism," as Sundaresan puts it. The researchers discovered that modifying two sets of genes caused the japonica rice hybrid called Kitaake to clone its own seeds. First the team found that in a fertilized plant egg, only the male version of a gene called BABY BOOM1 found in sperm triggered the development of a seed embryo. So the scientists inserted a genetic starter switch, called a promoter, that let the female version of the same gene do the same job. No male would be necessary to trigger an embryo's development.
widespread panic as their business model is threatened.
Why? Germs adapt. At every vulnerability they thrive. Asexual reproduction results in genetically identical organisms highly vulnerable to diseases and parasites. Already we have very few species (as few as 6) providing 60% of the calories used by the entire human population. We are already very vulnerable to something like Irish Potato famine, only orders of magnitude more devastating. And, replace these species with genetically identical clones? ....
But, it would be the dream of agri-chem business. I could see the dollar signs blinking on the executives "they are going to need more pesticides? and fungicides? Wow!". They will write staid professional dry proposals and forecasts, "Monsato believes there is great potential for the company due these scientific breakthroughs and development" in their prospecti and conference call guidance.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
No sex whatsoever, even for reproduction.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
This is what we want. Crop monocultures. So when a blight attacks one, the entire food supply is destroyed.
Boycott these foodstuffs. These bozos are not Israel and boycotting them is not a crime, heresy and treason all rolled up into one ... at least not yet.
Any particular reason you think these should be boycotted? Or are you just anti-science?
Technology cannot prevent crop failures and famines, in fact, these changes almost guarantee it.
We can't get fast enough to Mars to find that Prothean stash of technology in order to get it on with the Asari. Instead we will create them ourselves. Octopuses maybe involved.
I thought China halted the CRISPR frankenchink experiment
Why do you hate bananas?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...and 90% of my asshole is covered in underpants.
Hmm... Plants that can grow, reproduce itself, grow ,reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, infinium.
That sound like a cancer.
This right here just rings all the alarm bells (= matches all the patterns) of something that will nudge those delicate balances of resource cycles of nature way too much, causing a runaway set of feedback loops in them, that can derail a whole system, causing a permanent change on a massive scale.
Not that earth didn't already have this many times. But geologist and archeologists usually call them "extinction events" for a reason. Even if we can't casually imagine how "a few seeds" spreading in the wild can ultimately cause our own food chain to be ruined.
I mean, if you count the amount of extinct animals since we started meddling, this is already the largest extinction event in earth's history, surpassing volcanoes, meteorites, and even a complete change of earth's atmosphere from oxygen-poor to oxygen-rich.
CRISPER is a tool, far too powerful for the kind of troglodytes who still believe in the amassment of material things without an actual purpose, point or use to amass them for. And who can't think beyond a few puny steps of cause and effect, outright dismissing the above mentioned balanced loops as some kind of mindset/philosophy.
Just like nuclear fission, the amassment of material things, CRISPR, gene drive, etc are not bad things per se.
Neither are humans, surprisingly.
It's when we start using them for something that not only serves no purpose in getting us anywhere, be it whatever we currently call "advancement", or just real happiness (as opposed to drugs or having been trained to believe it makes us happy), or maybe off this rock... but actually moves us in the opposite direction.
(Fun thing that I noticed: Actually, conservative and progressive mindsets agree and complement each other on this topic. There's a beautiful little thing to take away for today.)
This is a common fallacy that we all grew into, but nobody ever seems to actually look into or thing about.
Mainly because we somehow believe that anything else would threaten the very existence of our individuality.
But if you actually look into it, it quickly becomes a silly concept. And not disappointing to dismiss.
The first question would be: Free from what?
Because if our will was free from everything... then by definition, it could not be based on anything (but pure randomness). And that's not will. That's just randomness.
And if it was based on something... anything really... then by definition, it is not free.
In physical reality, there are two things ever decision is based on: ...
- The sensory input of that event. (Including sensory distortion/processing.)
- The state of our neurons (aka bias).
But the latter is also only formed from previous sensory input, mangled by the previous neural state!
And so on, up to the egg and sperm and womb that we came from.
There, the state of "you" was also merely the product of genes plus epigenes plus environmental factors. So mostly your parents... which is where we come full circle (actually cycle) with this chain of cause and effect.
Now tell me: Where exactly would a concept of "free" will fit in there? And why?
Without starting with primitive superstitious pseudoscienceconcepts like a magical "soul" that exists outside of all of this, that nobody got anything to show its existence for.
We ARE the "more" in "more than the sum of its parts", where the parts are all of the above. ... or to act like our will or feelings aren't real.
That's alright.
No need to cling to comforting lies,
Predictability makes them no less real than anything else in the universe. We're just processes in causality too. And damn amazing ones at that!
I somehow never get around to making an account yet again (I'm here since around 1999.),
and somehow never manage to post anything without truly stupid typos, despite always using the preview function. ^^
With due respect - a bit of agri-science background gives you plenty of motivation to boycott cloned asexual staple crop varieties. Perhaps it is you who's not versed enough in the relevant science.
Anthropomorphizing "nature" or "evolution" and treating it as a sentient being with intention is a short hand used in the field of evolution.
Evolution is blind, and it does not have foresight, it is a mechanical process with random changes. But we talk about "evolution designed the eyes of Eagle to have two fovea" or "evolution gave white fur to polar bears". It is merely a shorthand. We all know, some random mutation happened to eagles or polar bears that gave very small survival benefit and eventually the accumulation of these small changes over time resulted in white fur for the polar bears or a double fovea retina for the eagle.
It is a short hand, we all know what this means. Of course, philosophy majors love such terms that use ordinary English words and attach their interpretation of what it means and run wild.
What is entropy? In thermodynamics it has a precise definition and can be measured. It is the heat energy transferred divided by the temperature. It is a calculated quantity like density or speed or acceleration. But unlike speed, density or acceleration it is difficult to give a "meaning" to this calculation. So some scientist came up with a vague statement, "entropy can be thought of as a sort of approximate rough guestimate of the disorder in the system". That is it. Every divinity major and every philosophy major piled on. People who could not tell enthalpy from entropy, who can't tell any form of the second law of thermodynamics even approximately correctly write PhD theses on entropy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So farmers who want consistently higher yields have to pay for new hybrid seeds every year.
This is seriously used as an argument? really? We all know there will be yearly licensing costs for using the intellectual property, enforced by an army of lawyers. Monsanto^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Bayer has shown the way, many will follow.
Could consider plants as invasive...
But people need their steady supply of hard cheese and insulin.
Apparently motivation enough that ad hominems suffice to counter criticism. Why even bother with presenting evidence or arguments! =)
People won't want it because it's not natural organic GMO-free and energy balanced with reiki healing crystals. How's Golden Rice doing these days?
couldn't we just do it again? We're approaching the point where living things can be built like machines and without waiting for generation after generation to get the trait you want. It's the same thing we did with selective breeding, we're just taking a shortcut.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
While you may no longer appreciate or even experience the wonders of sex, Monsanto et al, the rest of us horny devil's on this little blue gem whizzing through the cosmosâ"rice includedâ"still very much enjoy it, and suggest that you reacquaint yourself in the most productive way possible by fornicating with yourself. Perhaps you'll manage to clone yourself and subsequently all get whiped out by the flu. Whoopie!
So farmers who want consistently higher yields have to pay for new hybrid seeds every year.
This is seriously used as an argument? really?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how this was used as an argument. It's just describing the process and effect of hybridization, which is a very integral part of modern western food production, whereby two inbred parent crops are bred to produce a very specific hybrid seed. The planted hybrid crop in turn can only produce unpredictable junk seeds, for a similar reason as to why mules can rarely have successful offspring.
We all know there will be yearly licensing costs for using the intellectual property, enforced by an army of lawyers. Monsanto^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Bayer has shown the way, many will follow.
Some biotech company or university may have invested a decade of R&D into this. Using this crop variety may require signing a contract on how it can be used. This is standard fare in a capitalist economy with intellectual property laws. I don't think it's fair to blame specific companies and universities for wanting a way to finance such R&D. Blame the laws.
Ferris Bueller's teacher's wive's research has paid off.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Apparently motivation enough that ad hominems suffice to counter criticism. Why even bother with presenting evidence or arguments! =)
I'm not anti-capitalism or anti-science, I'm anti monopoly which is what cloned asexual staple crop varieties are all about. I am also against passing laws that make me a criminal and threaten me with jail time for consciously avoiding the products of country X and I am anti being made to swear an oath not to boycott country X as a precondition for remaining employed and not being blacklisted. So ... get over it! While I am not looking at serious jail time for boycotting agri-science companies in the business of setting up seed monopolies like I soon seem likely to get for supporting BDS on top of the Israel loyalty oath some US states and even countries are starting to demand, I'm going to boycott these agri-science companies and as many of their products as I can. Oh, and you forgot to post AC :-)
Though I understood about a tenth of what you wrote, you seem to be saying that you're against monopolies. While I disagree with that premise, the seeming introduction of non-sequiturs (passing laws, criminality, threats, jail time, country X, swearing oaths, employment, blacklisting, BDS, Israel, posting as AC) and your conclusion, I suppose it's at least an argument. That's all I asked for, and you sure delivered a fascinating one.
Here's your PM.
Now what?
I like to lick toes of young adult girls. Andnin return, I offer my anus and intestine for deep stomp footing, provided it results in a huge gaping prolapse.
Sorry for being so unamerican, and having used my brain more than the corporate government alotted slow drip.
Can't help you with being triggered and releasing your simplistic prejudice onto the world, based on your pre-programmed memes and a house of cards ego with an inferiority complex.
Get well soon, though.
Once this gets into the wild, this place will be as green as E.T.'s arse.
You sound like an Autist with Aspergers.
Normal humans know, that words are context sensitive, and their meaning's definition is only ever between speaker and listener.
While I agree that philosopy has a pseudoscience half that is from the same realm as religion, just like mathematics by the way, they usually do not mean our physics entropy, just like biologists (and snobs) do not mean the normal human definition of "fruit" or "berry" that we all use.
And I hope there isn't actually such a thing as a divinity major. Although with your fundamentalist god state, one never knows.
So you can stick your snobist rigid word definition bullying up your asshead.
Take your pills.
Yah. To achieve that we should start by tackling food waste
Raising production is the usual capitalist mantra, but sometimes solutions are surprisingly obvious.
With cloned rice seed they have irrefutable evidence you copied their IP.
Unlike hybrid GMO strains where the genes might be diluted over seasons, this rice will have almost the same genes generation after generation.
Furthermore thanks to its asexual nature, it would be easy to create a pest or disease to kill older seedstock when they want to upsell you new seedstock or if they believe their IP is being used without license.
Image when a whole population's food supply can be decimated with one targeted disease to which the grain supply is vulnerable. That would be Monsanto's bread and butter, especially when they can buy up the farms at firesale prices afterwards.
Can't prove him wrong eh? He must be right. xD
Does it have any food value ?
Whether it be selfcloned seeds or grafted sterile bananas, the problem is the same: you have no genetic diversity and a particularly well adapted disease/parasite can wipe out your whole population. ... who knows, ?maybe 20? different clones together, then a disease could adapt to one or more of those but not all. In the end, we could monitor the diversity after a few generations and know when we need to edit a new one to fill the pool.
This might very well be the case here. Of course, if they repeated the editing in different rice varieties, and distributed them in batches of
Of course its a lot easier than with bananas, mainly because it's not a full grown tree, also because this CRISPR editing is a lot faster than breeding another seedless banana variety from wild ones.
Need? You would be surprised how well I can survive without hard cheese or pharmaceutical insulin.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This sounds like promising research. If products come to market from it, there should be a label on it.
Both things can be true. If GMO products are developed that show benefit to consumers, they should be sold. With a label. Simple.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Too stupid to understand that "argument from authority" is a fallacy,
unable to follow plain logic, based on simple paradigms that everybody agrees to,
but still judging like somebody who wants people to think he's grown-up....
basing his judgment on only the post scriptum of the text too, at that.
You must be a Wikipedia admin!
Sorry, nobody cares about your opinion, child.
Though I understood about a tenth of what you wrote, you seem to be saying that you're against monopolies. While I disagree with that premise, the seeming introduction of non-sequiturs (passing laws, criminality, threats, jail time, country X, swearing oaths, employment, blacklisting, BDS, Israel, posting as AC) and your conclusion, I suppose it's at least an argument. That's all I asked for, and you sure delivered a fascinating one.
Though I understood about a tenth of what you wrote, you seem to be saying that you're against monopolies. While I disagree with that premise, the seeming introduction of non-sequiturs (passing laws, criminality, threats, jail time, country X, swearing oaths, employment, blacklisting, BDS, Israel, posting as AC) and your conclusion, I suppose it's at least an argument. That's all I asked for, and you sure delivered a fascinating one.
I'll take another jab at explaining this to you, it is not particularly complicated. Boycotting Israeli products looks like it is be about to be come a crime punishable by incarceration in the US and some other countries, in fact in the US some companies and state governments require employees and contractors to sign a declaration and swear an oath that they will not boycott Israeli products. I will gladly swear an oath of fealty to my own country but I see no reason why I should be denied a job because I won't swear fealty to Israel for the simple reason that I am not an Israeli. Furthermore since there is not yet a law banning me from boycotting corporations I will boycott them if that corporation's business practices offend me and I will boycott Israeli products, Russian products, Chinese products if those countries' policies offend me no matter what laws congress passes. Basically the damn government has no business telling any citizen who they can and cannot boycott. Let them slap me with the $1 million fine and 20 year prison sentence in their proposed Israel Anti-Boycott Act for refusing to buy Israeli oranges (or gene modified rice if they ever extend the anti boycott act to corporations) and see how that verdict holds up in the supreme court (hint: 1st amendment). If you don't like that then ... well .. tough! If this rant does not light the proverbial bulb floating over your head I'm sorry but this is really the most I can dumb this down short of drawing you a picture and I quite frankly have better things to do. Oh, and you forgot to post as AC again.
Well I was engaging in some hyperbole for comedic effect. But think of the diabetic Frenchmen, not only could their insulin and cheese be GMO, but even their wine grapes have been substantially mutated from their "natural" state.
They get on some stick horse, thinking it is a really high horse,
and act like saying something smart is "uncool" and grounds for ridicule and bullying.
While everybody unamerican facepalms, and thinks you're retards.
Oh noes! I used philosophy! What an idiot I must be! .. *stupidity*!! --.--
And that art thing is also clearly a sign of
Go back to your swamp wood shop, and suck your shotgun some more, troglodyte.
You just seem to be elaborating on the complications of boycotting, but all that was ever asked from you was why you wanted to boycott self-cloning rice. Could you instead elaborate on why self-cloning rice would lead to a monopoly? Judging by the paper's authors it seems to be a joint US-French research initiative, so I suspect it's not because of any Israeli involvement.
Can we call this new strain the Gros Michel?
> is encouraging for efforts to feed an increasingly crowded world.
So the population can grow a little longer, and the resulting famine will just be more serious afterward.
crispy rice ?!?
By all means boycott seed monopolies. However, TFA isn't about seed monopolies; it's about university research. Then again TFA also didn't mention Israel in any way, so your original comment seems to just be a rant.
P.S. skoskav wasn't the AC that originally asked for your reasons, just a non-AC that called you out. More than one person might actually respond to a line of thought. - "Original AC"
n00bs hacking javascript examples from stack exchange for web dev into an incomprehensibly large OS running at 1MHz on a remote cluster having with months long build cycles, years long test cycles with extremely poor test coverage.
But we're confident because we managed to get some lights to flicker on some of the boxes and our deployments never completely crash and we never lose money no matter how badly it performs anyway; even, if it fails to integrate properly with other systems. We can just go to work upgrading the other systems! profit!
People say how bad software engineering is compared to all other kinds of real engineering... but genetic engineering is the worst of all...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
With seeds floating in the wind
Do it with legumes, broccoli, and fish and we're good to go.