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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.
This proves pollution is not a problem, burn moar now!
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."
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
If this were to make photosynthesis and growth more efficient, I have a hard time believing that evolution wouldn't have made Rubisco more specific for CO2 instead of oxygen already. There is enormous plant mass on the planet, so there would be strong selective pressure and enough diversity for this to have come about. Making the plants "grow 40% bigger" is not a feat that shows photosynthesis is more efficient, only that they have changed the growth program.
Sure. "tobacco" plants
It would be great if we could put this to use in something for generating bio-fuels.
There is a light dependent reaction that creates ATP, which is the energy source for the light independent Calvin cycle which actually reduces CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I am not sure what they have hacked, but it is more complex than the summary suggests. And it would be an amazing achievement to be able to improve a system perfected by 4 billion years of evolution without any down side. I suspect there is a downside, maybe a need for more water etc.
Well done anyway, if true.
"Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember."
What kind of sophomoric fucktard would write something that patronizing? Hard to tell if he himself is a proud idiot, or if he just assumes his readers are moronic rubes. (Which is probably true, given that it's an NPR article...)
"There's a mineral on that island, Mr. Banks... It's called bubureau. I don't know anywhere else on the planet where you can find more than a gram of this stuff, and believe me I've looked! Because without bubureau, I can't make my superconductors!"
Remember when NASA had that massive announcement that one of their FEMALE 'scientists' had discovered 'alien' life on Earth- ie., life whose DNA used different elements from ordinary life. It proved, of course, to be utter garbage- just another attempt to boost the idea that females make superior 'scientists'.
Slashdot is paid to push the SJW agenda- and this garbage is also an attempted cash grab by the UI aimed at braindead and very credulous foreign investors.
The biotech biz is essentially 100% stock manipulation fraud- with nonsensical pseudo-science aimed at SF loving be-tas.
PS growing 'big' plants is child's play- ask any visitor at a market fair where there is a prize for the biggest vegetables. So faking apparent success in the growing of tobacco plants is trivial. Twenty years later, and the initial investors all ponder where all that 'promising' 'science' vanished to. When one of these cons is fronted by a female, it makes it all too easy to spot. And these particular cons all have the same pattern- namely "we can code DNA like how we code computers". This seems 'plausible' to the be-ta class that thinks outlets like Slashdot are informative. And investment cons are always exploitations against the funds of the be-ta classes and lower.
I hacked creimer's pooper with muh dik! I paint his colon my loads of baby batter.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The reporter who wrote this news article failed to address the fundamental problem: human populations' demand for resources grows to fit the constraints of the environment. So, increasing the amount of energy resources (by adding more solar panels, for example) will encourage the human population to use more energy. Increasing the production rate of food (by increasing the pace and extent of growth of tomato plants, for example) will encourage the human population to eat more and to produce more babies. Eventually, the human population will reach the limits of resources in the environment. The difficulties (at the limits) will again present themselves.
Although the size of the human populations in developed countries have leveled off, the size of the populations in Africa and other anti-Western areas have not leveled off. Increasing food production will not fix the barbarism in Africa. Increasing food production will only encourage increasing the number of barbaric Africans.
There is more information about this issue.
The only way to fix the fundamental problem is to reduce the size of the human population.
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?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Come on!
Let's get serious.
The soybeans can wait.
https://youtu.be/QbhqUG28uLQ
I find it a bit amusing that you proceeded to ALSO not give us the actual name despite complaint...
It is:
Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase
I agree, it was not THAT long. Probably whatever grammar checker system they had refused to let it pass. Or like you say he was just lazy and thought all his readers were morons. Either way, not a good look.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I heard better CO2 consumption. That's a big plus. :)
Yep, this invention (if real) runs completely counter to the Agenda 21 efforts to reduce human population. As a result, the research will probably be bought up, buried and never see the light of day.
All the same, beating four billion years of life-or-death trial and error is very challenging.
We have failed to make better let alone "best" far more often than we have succeeded.
... 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 made the detoxifying process way more efficient and made super tobacco, which is probably more toxic.
Wonder if smoking it will give you super cancer?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So let me get this straight. They hack the detox ability of the plant and does not tell us much about the toxins? Will this end it up in being poisonous? Now imagine that since this grows 40% bigger/faster/etc. this will likely out compete and hybridize with the ones we care about... So what could ever go wrong?
Make these changes to kudzu and release it into the wild!
..."It hops & pops because you put frog & chili DNA in it? Jeez!"
Table-ized A.I.
In the early days of automobiles there was a fear that automobiles might use up all the oxygen in the air. Thankfully, that did not happen (so far). Although in cities cars have generated a lot of paved roads, and off-road vehicles are screwing up a lot of off-road land.
But with this tech, I ask, what if this causes some loop resulting in using up all of the oxygen in the air. Or increasing/decrease the % of nitrogen.
I think that back in the Jurassic era the earths atmosphere had a higher level of oxygen, which allowed real big dinosaurs to thrive.
That would be cool
Normal crossbred plants only get a *2 YEAR* patent on the new strain to recoup costs in.
In comparison claiming it is tech instead, companies like Monsanto (or whatever they are called/owned by now) are using normal technology patents (which were never intended to be used on plants!) in order to hold a strain of plant hostage for 20 years. That's 20-80 seasons of crops depending on where you live, as opposed to 2-8 for regular plant patents.
As to this genetic improvement to plants, it sounds like it might be a winning alteration, until you look at a few super strains replacing all the diverse plant life in the world, much of which still hasn't been documented or sequenced and thus might have other compounds, either relying on that detoxification process or wiped out thanks to plants that don't require it that could lose us millions or billions of other chemical synthesis opportunities in other plants around the world.
This is how The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes starts, isn't it?
Is it too much to ask that the title matches the description of the article? "Scientists hack photosynthesis" ... yet in the very same description: "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". So they hacked a downstream process not photosynthesis. This type of sloppy journalism is what is making me loose all faith in this profession. Either read what you wrote or don't even bother. Thanks
The best way to make plants grow faster is to increase the CO2 levels in the air. Anyone with a greenhouse knows this. Current levels are a mere fraction of what they were when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Yaay! Kudzu that grows even faster!!!
I was expecting them to make the grabber more picky so it doesn't grab oxygen any more. Apparently that would be even more difficult.
In the last decade gene modification made to plants has resulted in much greater efficiency in the use of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As a result of this effect, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are growing dangerously low to the point of interfering with the respitory processes of animal life. At the current rate of decline in the carbon dioxide levels it is predicted that the earth will be completely uninhabitable by all forms of life in less than two years.
In other news, BreathRite, the company that makes carbon dioxide injector masks so that people can breath normally has increased the price of their carbon dioxide cylinders yet again, placing them out of reach of all but the most wealthy.
The declining levels of carbon dioxide have also caused a mean temperature decrease of 20 degrees over the past decade leading to a return of ice cover 80% of the planet.
Where are the GM O's that that produce a more nutritious food.All I have is easier to grow.
In the case of vitamin C, we are missing a single nucleic acid pair that would render it functional and we could produce our own vitamin C. Our distant ancestral species had this functionality and it was lost along the way. No big deal because of our diet.
So one problem that comes up here is that giving a plant species such a powerful advantage will change where it can and can't grow. Plants that can't typically grow wild in a region could easily become a noxious weed if they have a +40% resource bonus. Sure, it's great for any organisms that are above these new plants in the food chain, but not great for species being displaced and the organisms that depend on them for survival. Normally I'm all for GMOs, but this one scares me a bit.
Nitrate assimilation in plant shoots depends on photorespiration "nitrate assimilation in both dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous species depends on photorespiration. ... raises concerns about genetic manipulations to diminish photorespiration in crops. ... Extensive efforts to increase the specificity of Rubisco for CO2 relative to O2 and thereby increase the productivity of C3 crops have proved unsuccessful (5). Our results indicate that such efforts might have hitherto unforeseen consequences: in agricultural systems where NO3- is the dominant form of inorganic nitrogen, minimizing photorespiration may be associated with nitrogen deprivation."
Now, the new result isn't "minimizing photorespiration", it's exchanging the procedure entirely. How will this affect the plant's ability to uptake nitrogen? The articles does not address this question. Do they avoid describing the manner in which their test plants were fertilized?
So taking the Frankenstein Food aspect off the table, what sbout using this same technique to scrub CO2 out of the air? If it uses thess resources to detoxify then it stands to reason that all that reclaimed energy could go into plant growth. Re-seeding the rain forest (our biggest counter to CO2 levels) could take less time if this were to be applied to those species. One thing to be on the alert for is to ensure we are not creating new invasive species. 40% efficiency boosts can also mean sustainability in normally hostile environments. Perhaps a potential need for lunar or martian food crops?
Nature is not an idiot that is going to be fixed by mankind. If she uses the original inefficient detox process it may be for a reason. Probably is. Evolution would have selected bigger, faster long ago. So, wait for why it fails or doesn't do what they want exactly. Is the bigger, faster even eatable?
E Proelio Veritas.
So does the blocking of the detoxification of this toxic oxygen compound remove the plants anti-oxidant properties that are beneficial to humans when we consume them? Sorry, that was wordy.
The real take away here is that hydroponically grown indoor Pot is easier and faster to grow. I saw that and don't even partake of the bud.
"caustic pesticides" ... you're not even a shill, you're just fucking stupid.
I am Groot. I am Groot!
Just saying that one of the largest death producing industries might get a nice boost in productivity, all while contributing to the pharma bottom line, population reduction, and larger tax expenditure on treatment of addicted.
hopefully this improvement will reach useful crops
So when will we start seeing one of the benefits of scientific research?
New 40% cigarettes! (Same as 2% milk that came from non-fat cows)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Justin Trudeau noted that Canada's primary interest in this technology would have nothing whatsoever to do with tobacco.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
In 500 years, we'll have our giant crops dying because the atmosphere has not enough carbon.
Yahoo! More food. More people. Onwards to 20 billion!
"Look at bananas. They start out barely edible and end up as convenient as anything you'd buy in a plastic bag."
Uh, what? You appear to be trying to say something, but this wound up as nothing more than a word salad. Maybe you could put your word salad into a plastic bag? Would that help?
So a twice as efficient hacked-plant gets loose in the external environment. Probably takes over the whole niche and spreads globally, because, you know, more efficient more survival probability.
But then it turns out the hack led to another unanticipated weakness in the plant species's long term prospects, e.g. vulnerability to a lethal viral infection.
So the "smart replacement" plant gets wiped out globally.
When you are hacking genomes, you could be hacking whole global-scale ecosystems. Your safety protocols better reflect that. And they never do.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If there is such an agenda why are we currently boosting population growth in Africa? Without western aid the population would be a fraction of what we will make it in 20-50 years.
The more energy you have the faster you can grow and the more seeds you can produce.
That is why saplings reach for the sky in the first place. The fast ones survive, the slow ones get shut out of the sun.
Energy efficiency is very important.
The analogy is more about a truck that can haul twice the load with the same engine and fuel.
But Natural Selection seems to have produced a molecular system far more effective than anything that we have produced through "design". Given a few billion years, it has proven to be amazingly effective.
And Design is also driven by natural selection, as we tend to build upon earlier successful ideas, and do not invest in unsuccessful ones.
Before criticizing the intelligence of others, you should at least get your terms right. "Evolution" is simply the idea that things change over time, generally improving. That is absolutely part of human designed things, and was known by the early 1800s.
"Natural Selection" is what Darwin discovered. Namely, that making random changes and then just choosing the best of them can drive Evolution. As opposed, say, to Lamarkian ideas.
The big limitation of Natural Selection is that it works incrementally, and cannot combine aspects from different designs. So Ptresaurs could never inherit feathers from the birds.
...that the plants produce the toxin because it provides them with an evolutionary advantage against predators. Nope.
I cite from a comment above: "Frankly the paranoia and misinformation of liberals on the topic of GMO vs Organics is about as bad as conservatives and Global Warming." Except that pesticides and GMOs have very tangible effects on people's health, including mine. The last year was the first one in about 5 or 6 that I could eat apples without having diarrhoea. And it was not some magic medicine or disgusting fecal transplant. I simply found an organic farm nearby where I picked apples and ate them with no side-effect. I am sick and tired by "science-thumpers" morons that tell me everything new is good.