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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
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.
I doubt a scientific discussion is even possible on slashdot. I think we should confine ourselves to complaining about tech
Hmm... Plants that can grow, reproduce itself, grow ,reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, infinium.
That sound like a cancer.
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/
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.
The paper's researchers are from universities and research institutes:
Department of Plant Biology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
Innovative Genomics Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA
Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin, INRA, AgroParisTech, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Versailles, France
I don't see a specific biotech company being behind this research.
Ferris Bueller's teacher's wive's research has paid off.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Kudzu
Russian thistle
Salt-cedar
A few of the invasive plants that are causing increasing environmental damage in the U.S.
Heck - try to go hiking in Oregon. Blackberries have taken over practically every unshaded, untended spot in the state to the aggravation of all. The man who introduced them is cursed regularly.
Any species introduced into an area where it can thrive, and where there are no effective predators to keep it in check, will be invasive. They displace the native species, thereby also harming every other species that relied on them for food or shelter. The knock-on effects from that can be ecologically devastating.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
It seems brash to think that society only should bother choosing one specific solution. A seemingly more attainable approach to feeding the world would be a little bit of every solution:
* Introduce crops that are more nutritious, disease resistant, drought tolerant, and can be harvested more often in a year
* Reduce the use of arable farmland taken up by non-food production, e.g. palm oil trees for ethanol, maize for corn syrup
* Reduce the use of inefficient ideology-based organic farming with more efficient science-based farming
* Let land-use-efficient crops be a bigger part of our diets, e.g. by replacing some beef and lamb meals with fish, chicken and vegetables
* Slow down population growth in developing countries by helping them industrialize, increase education rates, decrease mortality and introduce family planning
* Reduce food waste in transportation, grocery stores, restaurants and at home
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.
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.
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.
crispy rice ?!?
Are you in Oregon? Seriously - I like blackberries, but when they fill all sunlit areas to a thorn-filled depth of 5-10 feet, and much more when they can bury isolated trees, that's something else altogether.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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...
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