5 ms·
Someone's already done that... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01670-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01670-6 Still has to go through al
by wbillingsley 9y ago
Someone's already done that...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01670-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01670-6
Still has to go through all the usual trials, etc, before it can be grown commercially, and then there'd be questions over GM regulation, market-acceptance, and whether the crop is productive and easy to manage for commercial growers to sort. (Usual productisation questions for a new crop variety to have to jump through.)
- ethbro 9y agoAlso, concerns about the long term (decades+) results of fixing similar issue by only splicing new genes in. Nature exploits opportunities. If we're still planting monocultures of cloned plants (plus whatever genes), that's still going to be enticing prey. See: Roundup resistant weeds. And life, as they say, finds a way.
- thriftwy 9y agoI'm not sure that fungus gains anything evolutionarily meaningful from learning to infect this particular banana. The only thing you get from this is annoying humans, which doesn't sound a very good evolutionary strategy (second only to being used in Chinese traditional medicine)