Perhaps there's a net good application to this, more yield so a plant can produce more, feed more hungry people, survive storage and shipping -- but I see 4lbs packs of Driscoll strawberries at my store, year round. The fruits are gigantic, way bigger than what a strawberry should be, firm, uniformly red, and absolutely tasteless. Same with tomatoes, bananas, potatoes, anything you could buy at a typical grocery store. Especially tomatoes, you can taste what an astounding difference between a commercially produced tomato (even with monikers like vine-ripened, kumato, heirloom, etc.) and an ugly homegrown one. I don't want this future, but my want is at odds with that of the producers: what's wrong with fresh tomatoes and basil year round? and that of the poor: what's wrong with affordable berries, asparagus, good-tasting not-mealy apples?
I remember when honeycrisps first came on the market, they were smaller, now they are gigantic, I don't know if they taste more diluted. I also remember green plumcots, they used to be smaller, more tart and sweet. Now they are huge!
How about nutrient content by mass, or some such measure?
I skimmed the article, maybe I missed it.
Aside: How easy is it to break into computational biology as a, say, practitioner of computational mechanics?
Growing more food can alleviate the distribution problem. At some point folks can grow their own, becoming less dependent on the politics of distribution.
Its not reasonable to dismiss this because 'we just have to distribute food better'. That's not been solved, with decades of trying. But eating local can be a bigger part of a real solution. And this discovery makes that 50% more effective, which is huge.
There's a link to the original press release.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/rna-breakthrough-crops-grow-...
And the actual article.
Interestingly this gene, FTO, is also known as the “fat gene” in humans too. Must be something fairly fundamental in growth/proliferation.
Like anything gene based, it can be used for good/evil. That said, it has great potential for good - with full knowledge and regulation. I can recall the old Disney cartoon of the lazy sorcerers apprentice on youtube. For example, something that ate chlorophyll getting loose in the oceans - call it chlorophage - the end of all sea plants that use chlorophyll..
Forget about yields, increased resilience to drought etc could be the big news if exploited. Deep root systems and resilience could dramatically reduce necessary irrigation & fertilization. Hardy plants need fewer inputs, deeper fertilization means less runoff, and deep irrigation means less evaporation.
Props to everyone here wondering about soil.
Speaking from the old school where fossil fuel, aquifer, and soil depletion are certain to kick in at scale within this century.
I love how the reaction here to any positive outcome is negative.
I'm a recovering doom porn addict but I do still like to watch others indulge.
We need more nutrient dense food instead of big food
I wish every time this sort of thing is tried, they would do it with the perennial versions too.
Surely some ultra hot-rodded perennial strain would eventually catch up with the old commercial variety? But when both are getting more productive, how could the perennial one ever catch up?
Also, just as we must demand we should reduce working hours with labor productivity improvements, we should also demand that we reduce farmland with crop productivity improvements. The market can never do this on it's own, it must be externally imposed.
How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?
Optimizing yield often sacrifices resilience in other ways. Let's also avoid a monoculture.
Original paper linked here (behind paywall) [0]. The researchers introduced the human FTO gene into plants to increase crop yields.
Would this be cannibalism?
You could use RNA demethylases from other organisms for sure, but it's a really interesting and weird concept, whether people would consider eating a plant expressing human proteins to be taboo.
How does this impact the soil?
The comments here are fucking inane and answered in the paper / press release.
Nutrition is fine, it's been tested. Not that it matters anywhere. The real poor need different nutrition, not more (or less) of the same. And your problem is you'll be to fat, or fine, or need targeted nutrition supplements in a pill under some circumstances like vegan or pregnant or winter in a colder climate.
It tastes fine.
It's not a Chinese scam (Western uni's were involved)
It wrecks the soil is a dumb statement, it improves the soil quality.
It's a real carbon sink.
Deeper roots also mean big trees in places that were hard before.
It's not just potatoes and rice and foods. It might be useful on all types of plants, like drugs, flowers, wood, scents. They just tried rice and potatoes first.
The only issue is it's a Noble prizing winning find. Why hasn't it got more press if it's true? This could be because everyone is fucking stupid. Or there's a big catch that no one has mentioned yet. 50/50 on that.
Coming soon ...
"RNA breakthrough revolutionises the porn industry"
And there will be no downstream consequences we discover 59 years from now… Like monasto pesticides causing cancer.
It's amazing to me that people are still claiming to do beneficial work when they work on improving yields or size in this case. The amount of food (let alone the size of vegetables) we produce is already enough to feed everyone, but we throw away at least a third of the food we produce (the internet is full of references for that) instead of distributing it fairly where it is needed the most (one part of the world is obese, another is malnourished).
It is clear beyond doubt that the real difficulty we're facing with food production is to sensibly set the limits of supply, so that excesses are avoided and to organise distribution so that everyone has as much as they need. Larger vegetables are not really a problem in the real world.
As to resistance to drought, while we're already in the shit for good with the amount of warming expected in the next decades, the root of the problem is not that our vegetables can't handle drought, it's that we have continue to fuck the environment and destabilise the ability of the planet to feed us. Solve this problem and stop faffing about with irrelevant bullshit.
While I see people worry about the nutrient content in the resulting food, I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products. While we fertilize the soil, the mention of "longer and deeper roots" means that such plants will take out more from the ground, making ground less usable for future farming. Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).
Sure, rotation of cultures is already common in farming, but this implies we'd move further away from organic farming rather than closer to it with the need to re-fertilize the soil to an even bigger extent (and deeper).
Or, it would make us move to other currently unexploited land, thus worsening the global situation we are in.
Basically, there is a potential in this, but I was never under the impression that any part of human population is starving because of us being unable to produce enough food (rather, it's waste and inequality, to name the likely top two).