3 ms·
Total aside, but as an undergraduate, I was part of the school tissue culture club. We brought 'albino' redwoods into culture and made a pretty hefty profit sel
by RosanaAnaDana 8y ago
Total aside, but as an undergraduate, I was part of the school tissue culture club. We brought 'albino' redwoods into culture and made a pretty hefty profit selling carnivorous plants on Fridays.
We did a tour of a local redwood companies tissue culture lab, and almost all the employees were female, and a fair few had developed severe arthritis in their work. Was very depressing to see.
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoWould it be possible to automate tissue culture with precision robotics?
- RosanaAnaDana 8y agoTotally. Especially considering that plants are a kind of biological machine which works to turn light into plant stuff. This means that how the plant interacts with light can tell you a-lot about the health and well being of the light. A pinch of machine vision, and you are pretty much there.
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoThanks. Is this already being done? Or is it a tech waiting to be delivered?
- RosanaAnaDana 8y agoI'm almost 100% convinced its already being done by private industry; you can do the vast majority of it w.out any ML/AI component. Biggest issue however is that it only makes sense on high margin plants. See, as it turns out, plants already have this novel/ ingenious way of packaging the data required to make complete copies of into very discrete packages. They're called seeds, and in general, for the vast majority of cases, seeds which are often actually cheaper than dirt are just fine. Only when you have a plant that has certain characteristics (GMO in a non-hereditary trait etc..) does this make real sense.
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoI understand. I was thinking of Apple and stone fruit orchards where commercially fruit is grown in a standard way and would require exact clones etc.