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Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' To Boost Crop Growth By 40 Percent (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember. Rubisco has one job. It picks up carbon dioxide from the air, and it uses the carbon to make sugar molecules. It gets the energy to do this from the sun. This is photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to make food, a foundation of life on Earth. "But it has what we like to call one fatal flaw," Amanda Cavanagh, a biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, says. Unfortunately, Rubisco isn't picky enough about what it grabs from the air. It also picks up oxygen. "When it does that, it makes a toxic compound, so the plant has to detoxify it."
Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says. They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. "They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger" than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots. The scientists are trying to apply this technique to other plants, like tomatoes, soybeans, and black-eyed peas, which are a staple food crop for a lot of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Cavanagh and her colleagues published their work this week in the journal Science.
Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says. They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. "They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger" than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots. The scientists are trying to apply this technique to other plants, like tomatoes, soybeans, and black-eyed peas, which are a staple food crop for a lot of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Cavanagh and her colleagues published their work this week in the journal Science.
Call it hacking and it's good, call it GMO and it's bad.
"This one simple trick a woman discovered in her lab!"
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
make the best thing. It makes the most successful thing among other things, but that's not "best". Ever wonder why we get scurvy? We have a defective gene that prevents us from making Vitamin C. We compensated in other ways, but that doesn't mean we're the "best", just better than the alternatives.
Same deal here. Think of all the energy wasted out there and imagine if we didn't waste it. Look at bananas. They start out barely edible and end up as convenient as anything you'd buy in a plastic bag.
Now, there are potential downsides to a mono-culture, but then if we can tweak genes at will we don't have to have a mono-culture, do we?
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There are two reasons why you're wrong:
1. Mutation can miss many optimal routes due it it being overwhelmingly a minor step-by-step process rather than a massive leap. Evolution works as relative competition against others. If no one has this change, you don't have to compete against it. And if they have to literally replace the entire system with another, chance of evolution developing it is not all that high. This is because developing such a system as a random sequence of mutations would be a very costly thing, while having to maintain the old system until the new one is fully evolved.
2. The mutation might actually have significant long term weakening of the plant itself against some competition, where it would need cultivation by another much more powerful species to make it an evolutionary winner. I.e. agriculture.
Evolution hasn't perfected anything,* it is a fundamentally conservative process circuit-bending existing hardware and occasionally developing something new. If changes help, they spread, if they hurt, their prevalence diminishes but rarely to zero, and if they're neutral they persist as well. Hardly the features of something that's guaranteed to make the best thing possible, but rather, like many software developers, something that's just good enough :-P
* A standard example being laryngeal nerves in giraffes.
Were that I say, pancakes?