Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' To Boost Crop Growth By 40 Percent (npr.org) 280
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
"This one simple trick a woman discovered in her lab!"
Re:Call it hacking (Score:5, Insightful)
Call it hacking and it's good, call it GMO and it's bad.
GMOs aren't bad, it's the modifications that are made that are bad.
Growing faster with fewer resources = good modification.
Able to resist being covered in increasingly caustic pesticides = bad modification.
Re:Call it hacking (Score:5, Insightful)
If only it were that simple. Frankly the paranoia and misinformation of liberals on the topic of GMO vs Organics is about as bad as conservatives and Global Warming.
I've tried to explain to people that food irradiation is a safe method of preservation for instance, and been told that they don't want "radioactive" food. Explain to them that bananas are radioactive and they will, with a straight face, tell you that it's "natural" radiation so it's healthy. Try to explain that "organic" food uses some truly scary pesticides or that all foods have chemicals in them and it goes right over their heads.
As far as GMO for Roundup goes, that stuff is expensive and nobody is out there replacing water with it like it's Brawndo. It's highly targeted spraying. However I do think that using GMO to lock seeds up behind copyrights and such is wrong. Modified life forms should be open source so we can all monitor and benefit from them equally.
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There are people who listen to the guy on the radio scaremongering, and the only part of it they understand is that rich people are trying to screw over the little guy. If asked to elaborate they regurgitate keywords, but all they comprehend is their emotions association with 'bad thing'. It's not just critical thinking, it seems some people lack metacognition entirely.
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It's not just critical thinking, it seems some people lack metacognition entirely.
Hence the emergence of the NPC meme.
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Irradiating food is a bad idea because if we live in a hyper-sterile environment our immune systems suffer.
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Such as what practices? Apart from accounting wrangles and the like?
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Prohibition of seed saving, copyright/patent suits against others when the trait hybridizes with other varieties, fooling courts into finding in their favor only to have their assertions disproved after it's too late, Harassment of farmers who choose not to grow their modified varieties.
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Don't pawn all that off on liberals. I'm fine with irradiation and sterile packaging for food and medical supplies.
I don't believe that GM techniques are somehow intrinsically bad, I just don't believe that the corporations developing them are at all angelic or infallible. That is, if there is a corner to cut, they will cut it and externalize the risks.
For example, will the work in TFA result in food with less anti-oxidants or more things toxic to humans (but not necessarily the plants). Perhaps, perhaps no
Re:Call it hacking (Score:4, Informative)
I don't want irradiated food because the radiation kills the plant. Dead food has far less nutritional benefits compared to fresh picked food that is still alive.
Furthermore, if I can get non-irradiated food, I can plant the seeds and get my own copy of those plants to grow in my garden. In my opinion, THAT is the real reason why the ag industry wants to irradiate all of our food. It prevents propagation of desirable plant species, making people subservient to and reliant upon the ag industry.
You know what? cooking food kills the plant, I don't see you advocating for all raw food, and if you are well, enjoy that salmonella. For that matter, taking a vegetable out of the ground or off it's tree/vine is slow killing it too. Which is neither here nor there because that's not how irradiation works.
Also, hate to burst your conspiracy bubble, but farmers rarely sit around peeling apart last years crop to get seeds for this year. They buy seeds from dedicated seed farms, just like the majority of people who want a garden go down to the garden shop and buy packets of seeds. You get higher quality, more consistent seeds. Just because a fruit or vegetable is raw doesn't even mean it's in it's seed baring form either.
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Eating raw food is inhumane. Being cooked is much preferable to waiting around slowly dying, then being ingested, chewed, and slowly digested.
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For many plants, you'd get an F2 hybrid, which won't be a copy of the plant the seed is from.
You need to have heirloom varieties, grown in isolation, to get a plant that produces seeds which will be the same variety.
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When you harvest the plant, you kill it. Your food is dead. Usually by the time you get it, very dead.
What largely degrades the nutrition is a combination of oxidation and bacterial decomposition. Yes, irradiation does break some molecules apart (that's what kills all the harmful stuff), but mostly into fragments that cooking will do the same to. The parts that are created purely by ionization are also found naturally, as guess what.. Ionizing radiation exists in nature.
If you want to grow your own, bu
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You can get raw heirloom almonds from some health food stores.
Although you can grow them from seed, this is not how almonds are grown by farmers. Almost every fruit tree is a graft of the fruit bearing plant onto a different variety that provides hardy root stock. So, you can have almonds with the desired characteristics, and the very best roots feeding them. So, almond plants are normally from a cutting which is grafted onto a root plant which was grown from seed or from a cutting.
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Its profitable to start a nut grove, but the first 40 years or so (100 years in some cases.. black walnuts?) is just asset appreciation until the trees mature.
I suspect these early nut tree groves are frequently passed around from investor to investor, as most other investments are better early on. Investors having trouble finding a place to park there money would be the ones that are holding them.
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Growing faster with fewer resources = good modification.
Maybe. Fast grown wood (like the faster growing pines) has its uses in our modern world, but is really a pretty crappy wood. Slow grown woods like oak obviously have far more uses. Even a slow grown pine has uses in more places and doesn't have the higher cost of the really slow growing trees.
My point here is that growing faster with fewer resources may make a plant that looks like the slower growing variety, but it may not be as useful as it appears.
Very few markets are really based on merit. They're skewe
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Call it hacking and it's good, call it GMO and it's bad.
GMOs aren't bad, it's the modifications that are made that are bad.
Growing faster with fewer resources = good modification. Able to resist being covered in increasingly caustic pesticides = bad modification.
It's generally the undiscovered side effects of GMO that people are afraid of. People aren't used to getting something for free, that's not how the world typically works. Therefore any improvements from GMO makes them concerned about what they are giving up. People in this discussion are already talking about that.
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He just hates Monsanto (see: Roundup [wikipedia.org]).
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Able to resist being covered in increasingly caustic pesticides = bad modification.
If they don't harm humans or the environment, is that a bad modification?
Let's not go that far. Roundup (the most GMO targeted pesticide) is by definition a poison and does have ill effects on humans in concentration. It's all about the dose. It may also be linked to bee colony collapse, but I don't know if that's definitive. It's meant to kill insects so not really a shock if it is.
Re:Call it hacking (Score:5, Informative)
Roundup (the most GMO targeted pesticide) is by definition a poison
Roundup works by blocking a plant enzyme that does not exist in humans. So it is not "by definition" a poison to humans.
and does have ill effects on humans in concentration. It's all about the dose.
Sure. Distilled water also can have ill effects on humans. It's all about the dose.
GMO crops generally reduce the need for herbicides and pesticides.
The worst use of Roundup/glyphosate is as a crop desiccant [wikipedia.org], sprayed on green crops to dry them out shortly before harvest. This means the herbicide is on the crop as it is harvested. This is BY FAR the reason Americans are exposed to the most glyphosate. This practice is banned in many other countries.
But guess what? It only works for crops that are NOT RR-GMO. So if you want to avoid glyphosate, don't buy any soy product that says "Non-GMO".
Re:Call it hacking (Score:4, Informative)
Two huge flaws in your argument.
1. We are symbiotic with our microbiome, much of which does have the shikimate pathway targeted by glyphosate. Therefore, it most assuredly, and emphatically, is a poison to humans, if we consume it in sufficient amounts to affect the microbiome. This is no longer even debatable or disputable. The ONLY question at this point is to what extent.
2. Roundup does not consist solely of glyphosate. It contains other ingredients which increase both its effectiveness in its intended use, and also its toxicity, since what kills our microbiome more efficiently kills us more efficiently as well.
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Never, ever eat anything with table salt on it, as that kills plants very effectively.
Never, ever use vinegar on anything, as again, that's used as an organic herbicide, and has vastly more toxic effects than roundup in the doses applied in agriculture.
In fact, never, ever ingest anything. Never use antibiotics, because, well.. The damage you do.
The dose makes the poison, and by the time it reaches place, it is well below the No Observable Effect limits to human physiology. Affecting the gut microbiome t
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I'll drink the same amount of glyphosate that it takes to kill a plant. That being, a 10th of an oz sprayed over a 30 acre field.
If you want me to drink a cup of it, then I'm going to insist you drink a cup of something safe and natural, like salt
(if you eat that much salt, it'll kill you)
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I can post links too:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-08/cancer-council-calls-for-review-amid-roundup-cancer-concerns/10337806
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-experts-testify-roundup-linked-cancer.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/health/monsanto-johnson-trial-verdict/index.html
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And according to the law, the tomato is not a fruit. Biologically, the tomato is a fruit.
The law and science are two different things. Sometimes in agreement, sometimes not.
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Yes, the lost it because the jury didn't understand the science behind it, and the fact that weaker studies said "there may be a link", while the strongest forms of study say "there's no detectable link".
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If they don't harm humans or the environment, is that a bad modification?
It is if that modification makes it easier to do so - as in Gravis Zero's example.
Anyway I feel like science is moving towards a situation where DNA of all species currently on this planet serves as "software distribution v1.0", and where modified species are deployed at will to do some specific job. Kind of like how a carpenter picks a chisel or a hammer from his toolbox. Politics or public opinion aside, if it's technically possible & profitable, somebody will do it.
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I must have missed a memo, which one is that that doesn't harm the environment?
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Able to resist being covered in increasingly caustic pesticides = bad modification.
If they don't harm humans or the environment, is that a bad modification?
Really?.. Yes... because it encourages the use of caustic pesticides...
Now I need to come up with some kind of quip orthogonal to "captain fucking obvious"
Re:Call it hacking (Score:5, Informative)
When you have companies trying to manufacture seedless versions of plants to replace the normal ones to the point they can potentially replace a sizable portion of our food supply with them and making us dependent on them
RR seeds went off-patent in 2015. BT corn (maize) went off-patent in 2016.
No other GMO crops are even close to a "sizable portion" of our food supply.
Anyone is free to grow, save seed, whatever. Glyphosate (Roundup) is also off patent. Anyone can make it, and plenty of generics are available, even at Walmart.
The "seedless" crops do produce seeds. What they don't produce is pollen. They use a "terminator gene" to block the spread of the genetic material. This is a GOOD THING, and it is also not used or sold anywhere because of protests by hypocritical environmentalists outraged that some of their best criticisms of GMO (pollen infecting neighboring farms, genes leaking into the wild) can be easily prevented. So instead of embracing the improvement, they fought to ban it.
Re:Call it hacking (Score:4, Insightful)
No other GMO crops are even close to a "sizable portion" of our food supply.
The vast majority of US-grown soybeans are GMO.
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> soybeans are a small portion of the food supply and we don't need them anyway.
and that's why billions are being paid out in subsidies to the soybean farmers this year as a result of the trade war blowback. Maybe instead of throwing dollars at rotting crops someone should take some of that money and figure out things to do with the crops?
Re: Call it hacking (Score:5, Funny)
Bullshit they should be tithing their entire r&d budget to the church. Create food and water is a low level spell and since we are discussing fantasy, we should end up with clerics long before replicators let alone warp drive.
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Able to resist being covered in increasingly caustic pesticides = bad modification.
If they don't harm humans or the environment, is that a bad modification?
Can you enumerate all of the unanticipated side effects? Didn’t think so.
By definition unanticipated side effects can't be enumerated, but that is true with almost any sort of research. What are the unanticipated side effects of the internet and social media? Are they net positive or negative? But do we seriously consider the risks of any new technology or development on a routine basis?
I do admit that invasive species are a real problem, and once they escape into the wild there is often no containing them. And the risks absolutely need to be considered. But if plants can g
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Have you looked at a map showing the location of release of genetically modified mosquitoes overlaid with Zika Virus breakouts?
A quick google search didn't come up with anything obvious. Got a link?
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1) The Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects that.
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Well, at least the researchers started this work on tobacco plants instead of food plants. It's not like the people consuming tobacco are really worried about taking up toxins, now are they?
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You missed the important part:
They created a wholly new, artificial, antioxidant pathway. The gain in growth, is due to the increased efficiency of that new pathway.
Re:Call it hacking (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature is great, but it's not perfect. Not every improvement can be attempted by nature. Perhaps this new pathway was attempted by natural selection, but the partial pathway (as it wouldn't spring up completely finished in nature) didn't give enough of an improvement to be worthwhile. Or perhaps the partial path had a hidden cost that made it less able to compete. A cost that is overcome by the full pathway, but one that prevented natural selection from going down that road.
Man has been artificially changing plants for thousands of years. Do you think apples looked like they do in the supermarket before man got his hands on them?
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The abstract gives more information:
The pathway that was the most effective was a hybrid construct "used plant malate synthase and a green algal glycolate dehydrogenase"
In other words, the components WERE produced by natural selection, but the combination does not occur in nature, and is novel in its efficacy.
Full knockout of the endogenous pathway should remove the need for the RNAi used to keep that pathway suppressed, and should result in the >40% biomass increase across the board.
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My only problem with companies like Monsanto is when they're given a monopoly by government.
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Monopoly on what? The only thing that Monsanto makes that most people know about are RoundUp and RoundUp Ready crops. They don't have a monopoly on glyphosate (RoundUp) and their RoundUp Ready crops compete with other herbicide resistant crops.
Sure, they get patent protection on their genetic technology but that expires. The first RoundUp Ready crops will go generic in a year or so.
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Yeah. Humans need to be more careful (Score:2)
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 protoc
Algae farms (Score:2)
It would be great if we could put this to use in something for generating bio-fuels.
Re:Algae farms (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately it will probably work out that rather than produce more food, which will subsequently lower food prices, they'll devote more land to growing high starch corn for bio-fuel.
Bio-fuel is a nice idea, but currently there are too many down sides and loopholes to relying on it that most people don't consider. It's like how paper mills have used black liquor, a byproduct of paper production, for decades as fuel in the plants. Then they mixed in a gallon of diesel, called it 'biofuel' and raked in billions from biofuel subsidies. [washingtonpost.com]
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It would be great if we could put this to use in something for generating bio-fuels.
Unfortunately it will probably work out that rather than produce more food, which will subsequently lower food prices, they'll devote more land to growing high starch corn for bio-fuel.
The good and bad news for both of you is that corn is one of the plants that already uses the more-efficient C4 pathway...
Photosynthesis is complex (Score:5, Interesting)
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/... [wikipedia.org]
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.
4 billion years of evolution doesn't necessarilly (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Photosynthesis is complex (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If the change they've made is so simple then by the laws of probability natural selection would have come up with something similar by now given how absolutely vital and common this enzyme is since the selectve advantages would have been huge.
Like the OP I suspect it has a downside and probably did evolve perhaps even multiple times but got weeded out for some reason.
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Citation needed. Specifically, why would there be ANY selective advantage? A tree standing in the sun all day most likely has no need for the extra energy. A plant has to produce enough foliage to gather enough energy to feed its trunk and roots, with enough left over to store around its seeds to give them a start on germination. Is there an advantage in a more efficient cycle that is not easily overcome with a slightly large leaf? How does that advantage stand with respect to the other survival requi
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Literally the first comment I can see to you completely misinterprets how probabil
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Could this be a C3 -> C4 pathway hack? Some plants rely on the C3 pathway to produce energy. Other plants rely on the C4 pathway. The C4 pathway is more efficient, and there's research to put the C4 pathway into C3 plants.
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They actually hacked the oxygen removal pathway. Apparently within respiration, plants pull in something like 30% O2 rather than CO2, and have to spit that back out. Plants turn CO2 into O2 by photosynthesis, and accidentally pulling in O2 instead is a waste of energy since it's not the feedstock of photosynthesis.
What they did was hack an enzyme which is involved in purging O2, making that process far more efficient. Now when the plant pulls in O2 by accident, it can very efficiently purge that and try aga
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They're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] which is used in the Calvin cycle when it grabs CO2.
But when it grabs O2 it makes some toxic compounds. The plant spends a lot of energy on detoxifying these compounds. From what they said in the article they hacked out this detoxifying system and put in a more efficient detoxifying system which uses less energy. That extra energy is not used to make the plant grow faster and bigger.
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That last sentence should read: That extra energy is now used to make the plant grow faster and bigger.
Irony (Score:2)
... 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?
Other applications.. (Score:2)
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
Wait for it; wait for it (Score:2)
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"it may be for a reason" It is. Nature doesn't scrap out an entire complicated process to 'try again'. That's part of that projection I mentioned.
Look closer (Score:2)
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)
And in other news... (Score:2)
Justin Trudeau noted that Canada's primary interest in this technology would have nothing whatsoever to do with tobacco.
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Re:preliminary findings (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Still not calling you back after fucking you in the ass for your science denial in that thread several months ago. No matter how desperately you stalk me on slashdot.
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Then you should take off the "I don't understand this argument because you're an idiot" glasses and put the "I don't understand this argument because I'm an idiot" ones.
Because you need not look beyond human gestation process to see exactly what I was talking about here. There's a clear cut evolutionary reason why the process of development effectively starts humans as fish with gills, that get apoptized as we slowly progress to something that resembles a mammal. Evolution does not build new systems as a ma
Re:preliminary findings (Score:5, Informative)
Some plants HAVE evolved ways of improving CO2 capture. It's just that the vast majority of the food crops people desire to eat are still using the old mechanism. Do some research on C3 vs. C4 and CAM photosythesis. Corn is one of the few food crops that uses the newer C4 photosynthesis engine. Corn's productivity is likely one reason why pretty much all of our cheap junk food today contains corn in some form or another.
Re:preliminary findings (Score:5, Informative)
Some plants HAVE evolved ways of improving CO2 capture.
The evolution of the C4 pathway happened in grasses, and they spread around the world about 6-7 million years ago. Tropical savanna replaced woodland in Africa, as the grasses outcompeted forests via more efficient photosynthesis. Hominids moved out of the forest into the expanding savanna, learning to walk upright, freeing up their hands to use tools.
The C4 pathway also meant plants could pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere, lowering global temperatures. The spread of C4-capable grasses may have been the main trigger for the ice ages.
Corn is one of the few food crops that uses the newer C4 photosynthesis engine.
Another big C4 crop is sugar cane. Millet and sorghum are also C4.
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I was under the impression that the evolution of C4 was the result of falling CO2 levels, not the cause. And as anyone can see, a grassland has far less biomass per given area than a forest so they're hardly a great carbon sink.
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grassland has far less biomass per given area than a forest
Grasslands have far more carbon in the soil than forests.
Grasslands can grow in arid regions that don't have enough rainfall to support forests.
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No. Ice ages go back way before grasses.
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There is also an assumption that being 40% larger is an ecological benefit.
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Species generally don't give a crap about ecology. They do what's in the interests of their species. Plants evolve traits that give them the best shot at the environment they grow in. Animals do exactly the same.
Every single species on the planet affects the ecology in some way, just humans have found a way to affect it the most.
If you get a 40% increase in biomass for the same investment in various pesticides, herbicides and general land use, you can either increase your production (if there's a market
And here it is (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
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Just curious, how does one pronounce that?
'Ribulose one comma five bisphosphate carboxylase slash oxygenase'?
Or are the comma and/or slash silent?
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I don't know the actual answer (how you would say the whole thing to sound normal to someone who worked with names like that), but I like to imagine the "," is pronounced by the same clicks the Xhosa use as part of everyday speech in South Africa...
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The worst thing is that it's actually not even that long:
"Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, commonly known by the abbreviations Rubisco or rubisco [1], RuBPCase, or RuBPco" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
Deoxyribonucleic acid isn't that much shorter and pretty much every high schooler who learned about genetics has at least heard it once.
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I thought the same thing, but then I saw the name:
Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase
Commonly known by the abbreviations Rubisco or rubisco, RuBPCase, or RuBPco,
Essentially, unlike something complex-but-used like CRISPR/DNA/CAMphotosynthesis, even the scientists who study it don't use the full name.
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Plants don't use up oxygen. They re-generate oxygen from carbon dioxide... And they typically don't use nitrogen from the air, although some plants (peas, peanuts, etc) symbiotically live with bacteria that pull nitrogen from the air.
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Plants respire at night using up O2 which more or less balances with what they release in the day. Back to school for you.
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Yes, plants use a little O2 at night, but that does NOT balance out with the O2 they liberated from CO2 during the day.
You're forgetting that as a plant grows, a large portion of the carbon taken from the air is locked up in its biomass. You won't get the balance in O2 consumption you seek until the plant's biomass has been fully decomposed away. And technically speaking, decomposition is not something that the plants do, that's the job of animals, insects, bacteria, and fungi that are eating the plants.
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https://www.pthorticulture.com... [pthorticulture.com]
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/ge... [ucsb.edu]
Do yourself a favour and get an education sometime.
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NPR reported it correctly.
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