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Science

Hybrid Rice Engineered With CRISPR Can Clone Its Seeds (sciencenews.org) 145

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
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.
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Hybrid Rice Engineered With CRISPR Can Clone Its Seeds More

Hybrid Rice Engineered With CRISPR Can Clone Its Seeds

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  • And at Monsanto - (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    widespread panic as their business model is threatened.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 )

      widespread panic as their business model is threatened.

      Should SJWs celebrate because corporate seed monopolies are broken by this tech,or mourn because the argument that “GMO means corporate monopoly” has been broken?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Shotgun ( 30919 )

        Since when does the SJWs have to decide?

        They argue that there are no differences between male and female, then they argue that certain males get special rights because they "feel" like a female.

        They argue that we should not consider a person's sex when hiring, and then argue that every corporate board must have at least one woman.

        The argue that race and cultures are all equal, and then go into a tizzy fit if a child wears a Halloween costume that "appropriates" another culture. So, obviously the cultures ar

      • "SJWs", really?
        Is this an area where that moniker applies?

        Wouldn't Agricultural Justice Warriors or Small Business Justice Warriors be more fitting?

        • When activists evaluate a technology purely on the basis of what additional legal powers it may give the company that deploys it, they are arguing social justice, rather than biology.

  • Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @07:38AM (#57869806) Journal
    It was there first. Was used by all living things for a long time. Eventually nature abandoned it. (Yes, I am anthropomorphizing nature and attributing to it free wheel and motives. Suck it up. It is the short hand we use. )

    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.

    • Wheel = auto correction for will

    • Re:Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @07:58AM (#57869858) Journal

      That's one scenario.

      One reason why Monsanto might not be happy about this is that farmers won't have a need to buy new seeds every year.

      Also if you can selectively modify the genes, what keeps you from adapting next year's crops in one fell swoop instead of waiting for nature to evolution the vulnerability out over ten centuries?
      If we get good at this, we might actually outperform nature by several orders of magnitude.

      There are certainly downsides to this, some of which nobody even thinks of right now. However, in the long run I'm not sure we'll have much of a choice. Population probably will level out at 11 billion at some point but feeding that many people isn't a piece of cake by any means.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by inking ( 2869053 )
        Doesn’t matter if they have to buy new seeds every year. Your employer doesn’t need to reinstall Microsoft Office every year either.

    • Re:Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28, 2018 @08:15AM (#57869914)

      There is a real risk in the extreme monoculture of cloned foodcrops. I still miss the taste of the Gros Michel banana of my childhood. The Cavendish banana is resistant to the Panama disease of the 50s and 60s, but a new strain has emerged that does affect Cavendish. 99% of export bananas are Cavendish. But probably not for long...

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 )
        Exactly. Bananas use asexual reproduction. ( info for those who are unaware of the connection)

        • Re:Why nature abandoned asexual reproduction? (Score:5, Informative)

          by DRJlaw ( 946416 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:01AM (#57870038)

          Exactly. Bananas use asexual reproduction. ( info for those who are unaware of the connection)

          Bananas do not use asexual reproduction. Human producers seeking a fruit that can be easily harvested and shipped internationally have propogated a sterile mutant variety [conservationmagazine.org] that, being a sterile mutant, doesn't have a wide range of alternatives.

           

          • 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.
            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 ... 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 fe

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

              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.

              But we don't actually do that with crops that have sexual parent stock, or even with most crops that are developed through grafted clones. Research how many varieties of corn there are, or how many varieties of apples (a grafted-clone crop with parentage that does not breed true due to horrendously complex genet

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      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? ....

      Who is suggesting that anyone replace entire species with genetically identical clones? What makes you think that the creation of cloneable hybrids is going to replace the hundreds [johnnyseeds.com] of varieties [harrisseeds.com] of sweet corn [syngenta-us.com], as just o

    • "Asexual reproduction results in genetically identical organisms highly vulnerable to diseases and parasites. "

      Diseases usually _are_ asexual organisms.

      • Yes, but they can easily go through several to dozens of generations in a single day, which compensates for the much slower speed of evolution per generation.

        They're also mostly not asexual - they just *reproduce* asexually. Bacteria in particular regularly get together with their companions for a little gene-on-gene action, swapping useful adaptations - so that a particularly useful mutation can (potentially - though its unlikely) spread throughout a population in the same generation it first appears. Th

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Yeah, this shit is why bananas are in danger of going extinct. [bbc.com] Bringing asexual reproduction to a core component of most of the world's food supply is the height of irresponsibility.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dasunt ( 249686 )

      It was there first. Was used by all living things for a long time. Eventually nature abandoned it.

      Nature never abandoned asexual reproduction. Archaea, bacteria, and protozoans all use asexual reproduction.

      Obviously we tend to notice big, multi-cellular creatures, but most of life is not.

    • Having a limited set of cloned plants to produce our food is indeed a terrible danger because of the risk of "potato blight" or similar. Fortunately we have developed the technology as illustrated by this story to free ourselves from this risk.

      It is early days yet but gene manipulation will change the world at least as much in the next 50 years as semiconductors did in the last. In 50 years time bullshit ideas like extreme human lifetimes, plants, animals, viruses and bacteria made to order, sustainable far

      • All I see is genetic manipulation taking less than a handful of proteins useful for pest control and pesticide resistance and spamming them across every plant across the planet. Meta-monoculture.

    • 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.

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )

      It was there first. Was used by all living things for a long time. Eventually nature abandoned it. ...

      Yes, what you say is true. However, you fail to acknowledge that natural selection must be present for evolution to take place and for sexual reproduction to matter. That is, weak plants die off and strong plants reproduce and propagate genetic variations that give them reproductive advantage. This doesn't happen in farmed crops, as we are not interested in hardy plants, instead we want yields, and as such we closely control and manage selection. As such it doesn't matter if this hybrid rice reproduces asex

  • No sex whatsoever, even for reproduction.

  • Sounds like an invasive nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @08:12AM (#57869900)

    Hmm... Plants that can grow, reproduce itself, grow ,reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, infinium.

    That sound like a cancer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Hmm... Plants that can grow, reproduce itself, grow ,reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, grow, reproduce itself, infinium.

      That sound like a cancer.

      Tasty, carb-loaded cancer. Get some soy sauce and vegetables and it's fried rice for everyone! (No egg, don't like egg in fried rice)

    • Begun, the clone war has.
  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      People in the rich western countries maybe. People in poorer countries want to eat and will look at you funny for talking like that.

  • Ferris Bueller's teacher's wive's research has paid off.

  • 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.

    • I've always felt that it seemed arbitrary and ill-willed to force GMO products to be labeled. Labeling products resulting from older GM technology that currently fill our grocery shelves, such as radiation or chemically induced mutation breeding [wikipedia.org] or hybridization [wikipedia.org] is never brought up, even though they're arguably no more predictable or safe [wikipedia.org]. Crops that reproduce asexually [wikipedia.org] already exist; shouldn't they be labeled too?

      Unjustifiably labeling GMO can sway uninformed people into incorrect assumptions, such as equa

      • I've always felt that it seemed arbitrary and ill-willed to force GMO products to be labeled.

        That's too bad. Consumers are paying the bill, and they want a label so they can choose.

        Consumers can exist without the GMO companies, but GMO companies cannot exist without consumers. Put a label on it. If your product really has a benefit, then the label will be to the benefit of the company.

        • That's what makes the labeling arbitrary. By that criterion, every product could be labeled for everything that it is or isn't. Should bread be labeled for its wheat being mutation-bred? Should Granny Smith apples be labeled for being clones? Strawberries labeled for being hybrids?

          • Yes, if it's protected by intellectual property, it should say so and list the owner of the intellectual property. If the genetically-modified organism is not protected by intellectual property laws or is public domain, and the modification was made in a laboratory by a CRISPR, then a simple marking showing it as GMO will suffice. It could be like those little markings they put on food that is kosher or halal.

            Is that acceptable to you?

            • Well, no. I do not find it acceptable, because it doesn't seem to convey any useful information. With labels for e.g. allergens, alcohol, tobacco or cancer risk, useful health information can be conveyed. With kosher and halal it conveys that it is compliant with specific religious practices. But whether or not e.g. a banana is a hybridized polyploid clone from Chiquita doesn't seem to tell the average consumer much for them to act upon.

              • Well, no. I do not find it acceptable

                It still doesn't matter, because the consumers are paying the bills. They get to decide.

                Eventually, you'll put a label on it.

                But whether or not e.g. a banana is a hybridized polyploid clone from Chiquita doesn't seem to tell the average consumer much for them to act upon.

                Oh, but it does. I don't want to support companies that would patent basic foodstuffs. I don't believe patents should even be allowed for basic foodstuffs. So I can act upon that information by not b

                • It still doesn't matter, because the consumers are paying the bills. They get to decide.

                  Eventually, you'll put a label on it.

                  I would argue that consumers also needs to be protected from misinformation. If consumers are falling for fake cancer treatments wrapped with convincing rhetoric, then various agencies -- whether state-operated, independent panels or journalists -- with expertise in the relevant fields should have a voice in the public discourse. You seem to be implying that consumers should be unaware of the science and motivations behind decisions, which I find to be extremely dangerous for a society.

                  Oh, but it does. I don't want to support companies that would patent basic foodstuffs. I don't believe patents should even be allowed for basic foodstuffs. So I can act upon that information by not buying Chiquita bananas.

                  Well, patents on food

                  • I would argue that consumers also needs to be protected from misinformation.

                    It is not misinformation to label a genetically-modified organism that is protected by intellectual property laws as a genetically-modified organism that is protected by intellectual property laws. Since it is a true fact, it is the very opposite of misinformation. It's quite suspicious that there is so much effort to this one very plain fact.

                    Well, patents on foodstuff have existed for over a century

                    No, the first patent of a plant

                    • It is not misinformation to label a genetically-modified organism that is protected by intellectual property laws as a genetically-modified organism that is protected by intellectual property laws. Since it is a true fact, it is the very opposite of misinformation. It's quite suspicious that there is so much effort to this one very plain fact.

                      And again, I consider the presence of the label to be unjustified, as you have not shown the label to have any relevance for consumers. If more consumers were informed on food science, they may not want irrelevant labels on most of their food, as other people could draw incorrect safety conclusions, e.g. from reading that their potatoes are a result of radiation breeding, compared to being inbred.

                      No, the first patent of a plant didn't occur until 1931, and it wasn't a basic foodstuff.

                      You're may be right for US patents. Though as I'm unable to find the source I was thinking of, we'll stick with

                    • So am I understanding you correct that you want to combat food patents by labeling the type of plant production used?

                      No, come on, that's not what I said. Producers have no problem putting the little "tm" symbol next to every single one of their trademarks, along with the name of the trademark holder, so why the problem labeling the produce with a simple indication that the organism is patented and the name of the owner?

                      But I'm at least glad that you withdrew your claim that a label would be "misinformatio

                    • No, come on, that's not what I said. Producers have no problem putting the little "tm" symbol next to every single one of their trademarks, along with the name of the trademark holder, so why the problem labeling the produce with a simple indication that the organism is patented and the name of the owner?

                      Well it seems to me that you keep changing what you want on the label. In your initial post you wanted to label GMO. A couple of comments later you seemed to agree that mutation breeding, clones and hybrids should also be labeled, in addition to any intellectual property holder. Now you're saying that only information about any intellectual property holder should be included.

                      Now, if you want the label to include the technology used (mutation breeding, hybridization, cloning, GMO, etc.) in order for the cons

                    • "Misinformation" was in reference to the fake cancer treatment example. You seemed to be saying that anything the consumer wanted on the label, they could have. That could include misinformation, or in the case of labeling the technology used -- misleading information.

                      Now you're just arguing with strawmen and making shit up. I'm out.

                    • That's too bad. Consumers are paying the bill, and they want a label so they can choose.

                      It still doesn't matter, because the consumers are paying the bills. They get to decide.

                      Eventually, you'll put a label on it.

                      In context to what you were responding to, it sounded to me like you meant that labeling was completely the consumers' choice, regardless of what the label said, or its intent was. I thought that was a charitable interpretation of your arguments, but it's unfortunate that we misunderstood each other. I thought you had an interesting viewpoint though.

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