from the make-hay-while-the-sun-shines dept.
Scientists affiliated with the RIPE (Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency) Project at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service report that they have been able to increase photosynthetic efficiency in genetically engineered tobacco plants by 40% over normal tobacco plants.
They did this by working around a well known problem in many types of plants. Instead of only taking in CO2, the main enzyme involved, rubisco, also can bind oxygen. This not only doesn't produce the usual carbohydrate that is the base of the food chain, it creates toxic side products that the plants have to spend energy to break down into safe forms.
The key thing they show is that they can do this not in the laboratory, but in ordinary fields here in Central Illinois. Tobacco is a common "lab rat" plant, so it's not about the tobacco industry. Many of our biggest crops (so called C3 plants) waste energy this way. If they can do it for tobacco, they probably can do this for other plants as well.
PhysOrg: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-shortcut-photosynthetic-glitch-boost.html
Original Science Paper (may be paywalled): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/eaat9077
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 09 2019, @01:32AM (10 children)
This has me thinking I should start a tobacco garden. Loose tobacco is pretty damned cheap and they don't do a tenth of the stuff to it that they do to pre-assembled cigarettes but it'd still be nice to know exactly what's been done to it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday January 09 2019, @03:41AM (3 children)
My dad used to grow it in his garden. He did it more as a lark than anything practical. The growing is easy. It's the curing and aging for a year or more that takes time and getting the conditions right.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday January 09 2019, @09:22AM (2 children)
Pfft, amateur. If he'd used the right curing accelerant [wikia.com] he'd have had a full tomacco crop overnight.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Thursday January 10 2019, @12:49AM (1 child)
Yeah, but those overly protective homeland security types get twitchy when you start putting plutonium in your garden.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday January 10 2019, @11:22PM
It's ok though as long as you get a license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tomacco, and Firearms/Fissionables. Although I think they're closed during the shutdown ... but then again, maybe DHS is too .
(Score: 3, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 09 2019, @04:14AM (4 children)
You grow it in your Garden -- no Tax. You don't pay Tax on it. That makes you smart. I hate the way our government spends our taxes because they are wasting our money. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re running it so poorly. Whether it’s spent in Iraq or wherever they’re spending it, they are wasting our money. So I do hate the way our government spends our money.
(Score: 4, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 09 2019, @04:29AM (2 children)
Good job on making sure they can't spend as much of it for the past couple weeks then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 09 2019, @08:37AM (1 child)
Or, when they get back their control, waste some more on an ineffective wal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 09 2019, @11:21AM
If they thought it would be ineffective, nobody would be bitching. As far as boondoggles go, less than ten billion wouldn't be out of the ordinary for DC.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @02:40PM
Like border walls? I hate it when politicians waste money on useless border walls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @06:05PM
It's good for intercropping, and not hard to grow in most climates. The processing is where all the annoyance is.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @02:06AM (2 children)
Uh.. wait a minute....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @03:01AM
"Well, I was a farmer, like everybody else back then. Of course, you didn't start that way. The wheat had died. The blight came, and we had to burn it. And we still had corn. We had acres of corn, but mostly we had dust."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @12:18PM
That comment is not funny. In case there is anyone who didn't notice I'll write this here. If this works this means that modified plants will use less energy to steal more CO2 and dump more poison called oxygenium (in latin) into atmosphere. Of course this won't work like almost anything these days.
Okay my comment is not much better.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday January 09 2019, @04:51AM (2 children)
Attack of the killer tobaccos!
Attack of the killer tobaccos!
They'll beat you, bash you,
Squish you, mash you
Chew you up for brunch
And finish you off for dinner or lunch!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 09 2019, @08:39AM (1 child)
Now, 40% more efficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 09 2019, @03:31PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @03:38PM (4 children)
For not fixing this on your own.
There is no doubt a reason it did not find this, either it wasn't that much of a benefit or has a hidden cost.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Wednesday January 09 2019, @04:26PM (1 child)
On evolutionary timescales the CO2 content of the atmosphere was a lot higher.
The efficiency gain from this probably wasn't as important in an atmosphere with >1000ppm CO2.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2019, @05:26PM
Or there's a key side-effect that scientists or farmers haven't discovered yet.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:12AM
Actually, evolution/nature did fix it in some plants in two different ways. Some grasses like corn and sugar cane are what are called C4 plants. They make sure that rubisco works in a high CO2 environment. But there's a downside that this particular fix wastes energy to maintain that high CO2 level, and tends to be more worth it in hot dry conditions.
Similarly, CAM plants (pineapples, for example) have a different fix for photorespiration by only taking in CO2 at night and storing it for use in the day. Again, it means rubisco only gets CO2, not oxygen and tends to be "worth it" in hot dry conditions.
In a lot of wetter cooler conditions, C3 plants have the advantage. The problem is that the plants that developed fixes for photorespiration had to use what they had "laying around" in their genomes already. This introduces a fix that's different in that it doesn't change the environment that rubisco works in, but allows the side products to be used for energy rather than taking more energy to deal with them.
This is very promising, but not ready for prime time yet. They still have to do it in other plants and also show that there aren't unknown downsides to it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:01AM
Or, as is quite often the case in evolution, it gets stuck in a local maximum, where any mutation would reduce efficiency, and thus be bred out of the population. It's like trying to climb a mountain when you can only move upwards - it works great for a while, but eventually you're going to reach a smaller peak and have to cross a valley to keep climbing the mountain. Blind trial and error just doesn't have the intelligence or perspective to hike down through the valley so that it can get back to climbing the mountain again.
One of the strongest argument against Intelligent Design is that you see these sort of local-maximum dead-ends *everywhere* in biology. An Intelligent Designer would have done a much better job - heck, now that we have the tools and are starting to understand the language, even our own limited intelligence is able to make dramatic improvements.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday January 09 2019, @05:24PM
Okay, boost the efficiency of photosythesis, wonderful- - sounds like an unmitigated win for agriculture, right?
But what of the unintended consequences?
First there's the obvious - what is the nutrition and toxicity profile of the new chemical pathway they've created - i.e. will eating the new leaves, saturated with new bio-chemicals, cause health problems for animals (or even more importantly, the bacteria, fungi, etc. that our ecosystem is built on)
Second there's the invasive organism potential - a 40% increase in photosynthesis efficiency is going to give a plant a massive survival and competition advantage, likely enough to choke out a whole lot of competing plants. That's almost always a bad thing for the ecology.
Then there's the larger part of that problem - crossbreeding. Replacing part of something as integral as the photosynthesis pathway might be a big enough change to make wild hybrids un-viable, in which case no problem. Plants though tend to have massively redundant genomes, so there's a fair chance that hybrids may inherit both full pathways - in which case they and ~1/2 of their offspring (with other hybrids) will likely get a still-substantial advantage, while another 1/4 of their offspring will get the full new pathway.
As much as I love the idea on the surface, this is one of the nightmare scenarios for GMOs running amok.