10 ms·

A genetic modification boosts grain yields, shortens the growth duration of rice

124 points by zeristor 4y ago

zeristor 4y ago
A very impressive improvement, it would nice if taste and nutrients improved.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  According to the description, there should be no changes in either taste or nutrients, which is a good thing. This kind of genetic manipulation, where the control of gene expression is modified for greater productivity, is much more promising than the attempts to make a plant produce different chemical substances than it was producing previously or behave differently in the presence of pesticides, because for the latter cases it is still very difficult to predict whether the genetic changes that are done will have only the desired effects, without other undesirable consequences.
  - prirun 4y ago
    > it is still very difficult to predict whether the genetic changes that are done will have only the desired effects This is true universally IMO.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    Is there much research into doing the same for non food crop plants? Like for trees with the goal of faster reforestation?
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  What even are "nutrients"? It seems such a nebulous term. Do we really have a vitamin problem with a modern diet? I sure as heck don't know anyone getting rickets or scurvy or beri-beri.
i_am_proteus 4y ago
Questions I ask upon seeing these results: How much more fertilizer and water input is needed to realize these results? As these two resources become scarce, we should start thinking about yield per unit input rather than simply yield per acre. Is this new crop safe for humans and animals to eat? How do we know?
- adrian_b 4y ago
  From the description, proportionally more fertilizer (and water) is required, because one of the effects of the genetic change is an increased rate of extraction for the nitrogen compounds from the soil. The increased rate of nitrogen extraction, together with the higher rates of photosynthesis (which needs water to provide the hydrogen for reducing carbon dioxide, nitrates and sulfates) and of carbon dioxide reduction lead to a higher productivity. Unlike for some of the other genetically-modified crops, from the description there does not seem to be any reason to worry about eating such a rice, as the genetic modification does not seem to have any qualitative effects, but only quantitative effects, resulting in higher rates for the same chemical processes as in non-modified rice, obtained by multiplying the reaction sites.
  - 32163704 4y ago
  - owl57 4y ago
    I'm no biologist or chemist, but generally plant growth is a huge chain of chemical processes, and if you make some subset of these faster, can it lead, for example, to accumulation of byproducts that are normally used up nearly completely? Or to unexpected regulation of some other reactions, including possibly expressing something bad that's usually only made in the cells we don't eat, up to the anti-herbivore toxins?
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      Such things cannot be completely excluded, but they should also be easy to detect. I assume that for any such new cultivar many detailed chemical analyses will be done before deciding that all went well. Such side effects can also happen when using more traditional methods, i.e. selection of improved cultivars from plants that have suffered spontaneous random mutations or random mutations caused by mutagenic agents. On the other hand, when you insert a foreign gene in the plant genome, e.g. with the purpose of making it pest-resistant, the results are far more unpredictable then in cases like this, where an already existing gene has been duplicated, in order to increase its activity.
photochemsyn 4y ago
This is the kind of GMO that's generally considered fairly benign as they're only increasing the expression of genes already found in the plant, not doing weird stuff like putting fish antifreeze genes in strawberries. You still have to be careful in some cases (for example, humans have bred toxins out of many food crops by reducing expression levels over generations; the genes for toxins might still be there, i.e. potatoes, so you'd not want to trigger their expression accidentally). As far as nitrogen use, the claim is that these plants utilize nitrogen more efficiently than wild-type, so that you'd actually have to apply less nitrogen fertilizer and thus there'd be less nitrogen runoff from fields into lakes/streams etc. From the materials and methods: > "For nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) measurement, rice plants were grown in three independent field blocks supplied with 0, 100, or 200 kg N/ha. The study was performed in the Experimental Station of the Institute of Crop Science, CAAS, in Beijing from May to October, 2021. The N fertilizer was applied as urea at two stages: 40% at the tillering stage and 60% at the heading stage. Each line was cultivated in randomized plots with 20 cm spacing between rows and plants, and each plot contained at least 50 plants per line." Oddly enough, the publisher makes materials and methods freely available but not results and discussion, go figure.
- msla 4y ago
  > not doing weird stuff like putting fish antifreeze genes in strawberries. Oooh! Weird! Modifying my immune system to be able to fight cancer is "weird" too, right? Is there a good reason to use "weird" as a criterion in any of this? Because I like being a GMO organism who isn't dying of cancer, and people using "weird" as a metric make me a bit uneasy about how much longer such treatments are going to be allowed. Remember: GMO isn't just about the "Organic" aisle at Amazon Whole Foods.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    I think “weird” here means “things that may have unexpected side effects.” Cancer treatments have loads of those but we put up with them because death is worse. Eating strawberries and rice maybe exists at a different point on the risk continuum.
mdf 4y ago
Land use throughout the globe is at an unsustainable level, causing habitat loss for species and reduction in carbon sinks. Getting farmland to produce more per square meter would be very important, and the results presented in the article seem like a possibility in that regard. I wonder how this would combine with the effort[1] to modify rice to use the C4 kind of photosynthesis, if realized. [1] https://c4rice.com/ https://c4rice.com/
xbar 4y ago
How much more Roundup is required?
hyperpallium2 4y ago
Growing more quickly means higher ratio of calories to other nutrients.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Yes, but I wonder if it matters when vitamins are widely available? Or alternatively, some nutrients get added at a later step. Iodized salt, for example. This might seem less "natural" but it seems like it would work?
  - hyperpallium2 4y ago
    That helps, though an issue is bioavailability - vitamin forms are typically harder for the body to process than the forms in food. There can also be other nutrients required together (e.g. calcium with vitamin D). Finally, I am 100% sure that, despite progress (e.g. fortified bread), we don't yet know all the nutrients, forms, and interactions. Nutrition science is historically dodgey.
    - hyperpallium2 4y ago
      ADD: rickets was common in England in the 17th century due to dietary changes, and it took a while for the cause and solution to be figured out: a legal requirement to fortify some foods with vitamin D. What rising disorders today are caused by dietary changes? Austism? Infertility? You'd think we'd be much quicker at finding a dietary cause today - unless the ones we haven't found yet are harder to find. One of the greatest health problems today has a obvious relationship to calories: obesity. Perhaps simply getting more calaries for the same mass of food is a factor? Or, maybe our feeling of hunger is triggered by a lack of nutrients other than calories? So we eat and eat but are not satisfied.
  - oofbey 4y ago
    Diet research is super hard. But the current consensus is that nutrients are best obtained from natural sources.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
irthomasthomas 4y ago
There was a study shared here, a while ago, that found total nutritional content remained the same while total yields increased. In other words, all the efforts to increase yield have, so far, only increased the water content of the produce. Our vegetables, today, are fatter, but less nutritious. I expect this development will be similar.
- kaiwen1 4y ago
  > Good nutrition was one reason: Isotopic tracers revealed the plants with extra copies of OsDREB1C took up extra nitrogen through their roots and moved more of it to the shoots. Extra nitrogen -> more protein (not water).
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  Interesting anecdote: ever since "supply chain issues" became a thing, my local big name grocery stores (Kroger, etc.) have had much smaller but much more flavorful produce as they've resorted to sourcing more locally. Also more expensive, at first, and they go bad/get bruised much faster than they get sold, so they get marked down back to affordability within a few days of a shipment, until there are none left and the cycle repeats. I can't say I mind the change.
osigurdson 4y ago
I think we should try to do more with automation to produce food more cheaply. I’d rather have a zillion little robots clipping weeds than spraying roundup on GMO roundup resistant crops to achieve the same effect. A farmer’s job should be to press one button in the spring.

124 points by zeristor 4y ago

zeristor 4y ago

A very impressive improvement, it would nice if taste and nutrients improved.

adrian_b 4y ago
According to the description, there should be no changes in either taste or nutrients, which is a good thing. This kind of genetic manipulation, where the control of gene expression is modified for greater productivity, is much more promising than the attempts to make a plant produce different chemical substances than it was producing previously or behave differently in the presence of pesticides, because for the latter cases it is still very difficult to predict whether the genetic changes that are done will have only the desired effects, without other undesirable consequences.
- prirun 4y ago
  > it is still very difficult to predict whether the genetic changes that are done will have only the desired effects This is true universally IMO.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Is there much research into doing the same for non food crop plants? Like for trees with the goal of faster reforestation?
RealityVoid 4y ago
What even are "nutrients"? It seems such a nebulous term. Do we really have a vitamin problem with a modern diet? I sure as heck don't know anyone getting rickets or scurvy or beri-beri.

i_am_proteus 4y ago

Questions I ask upon seeing these results: How much more fertilizer and water input is needed to realize these results? As these two resources become scarce, we should start thinking about yield per unit input rather than simply yield per acre. Is this new crop safe for humans and animals to eat? How do we know?

adrian_b 4y ago
From the description, proportionally more fertilizer (and water) is required, because one of the effects of the genetic change is an increased rate of extraction for the nitrogen compounds from the soil. The increased rate of nitrogen extraction, together with the higher rates of photosynthesis (which needs water to provide the hydrogen for reducing carbon dioxide, nitrates and sulfates) and of carbon dioxide reduction lead to a higher productivity. Unlike for some of the other genetically-modified crops, from the description there does not seem to be any reason to worry about eating such a rice, as the genetic modification does not seem to have any qualitative effects, but only quantitative effects, resulting in higher rates for the same chemical processes as in non-modified rice, obtained by multiplying the reaction sites.
- 32163704 4y ago
- owl57 4y ago
  I'm no biologist or chemist, but generally plant growth is a huge chain of chemical processes, and if you make some subset of these faster, can it lead, for example, to accumulation of byproducts that are normally used up nearly completely? Or to unexpected regulation of some other reactions, including possibly expressing something bad that's usually only made in the cells we don't eat, up to the anti-herbivore toxins?
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    Such things cannot be completely excluded, but they should also be easy to detect. I assume that for any such new cultivar many detailed chemical analyses will be done before deciding that all went well. Such side effects can also happen when using more traditional methods, i.e. selection of improved cultivars from plants that have suffered spontaneous random mutations or random mutations caused by mutagenic agents. On the other hand, when you insert a foreign gene in the plant genome, e.g. with the purpose of making it pest-resistant, the results are far more unpredictable then in cases like this, where an already existing gene has been duplicated, in order to increase its activity.

photochemsyn 4y ago

This is the kind of GMO that's generally considered fairly benign as they're only increasing the expression of genes already found in the plant, not doing weird stuff like putting fish antifreeze genes in strawberries. You still have to be careful in some cases (for example, humans have bred toxins out of many food crops by reducing expression levels over generations; the genes for toxins might still be there, i.e. potatoes, so you'd not want to trigger their expression accidentally). As far as nitrogen use, the claim is that these plants utilize nitrogen more efficiently than wild-type, so that you'd actually have to apply less nitrogen fertilizer and thus there'd be less nitrogen runoff from fields into lakes/streams etc. From the materials and methods: > "For nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) measurement, rice plants were grown in three independent field blocks supplied with 0, 100, or 200 kg N/ha. The study was performed in the Experimental Station of the Institute of Crop Science, CAAS, in Beijing from May to October, 2021. The N fertilizer was applied as urea at two stages: 40% at the tillering stage and 60% at the heading stage. Each line was cultivated in randomized plots with 20 cm spacing between rows and plants, and each plot contained at least 50 plants per line." Oddly enough, the publisher makes materials and methods freely available but not results and discussion, go figure.

msla 4y ago
> not doing weird stuff like putting fish antifreeze genes in strawberries. Oooh! Weird! Modifying my immune system to be able to fight cancer is "weird" too, right? Is there a good reason to use "weird" as a criterion in any of this? Because I like being a GMO organism who isn't dying of cancer, and people using "weird" as a metric make me a bit uneasy about how much longer such treatments are going to be allowed. Remember: GMO isn't just about the "Organic" aisle at Amazon Whole Foods.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I think “weird” here means “things that may have unexpected side effects.” Cancer treatments have loads of those but we put up with them because death is worse. Eating strawberries and rice maybe exists at a different point on the risk continuum.

mdf 4y ago

Land use throughout the globe is at an unsustainable level, causing habitat loss for species and reduction in carbon sinks. Getting farmland to produce more per square meter would be very important, and the results presented in the article seem like a possibility in that regard. I wonder how this would combine with the effort[1] to modify rice to use the C4 kind of photosynthesis, if realized. [1] https://c4rice.com/ https://c4rice.com/

xbar 4y ago

How much more Roundup is required?

hyperpallium2 4y ago

Growing more quickly means higher ratio of calories to other nutrients.

skybrian 4y ago
Yes, but I wonder if it matters when vitamins are widely available? Or alternatively, some nutrients get added at a later step. Iodized salt, for example. This might seem less "natural" but it seems like it would work?
- hyperpallium2 4y ago
  That helps, though an issue is bioavailability - vitamin forms are typically harder for the body to process than the forms in food. There can also be other nutrients required together (e.g. calcium with vitamin D). Finally, I am 100% sure that, despite progress (e.g. fortified bread), we don't yet know all the nutrients, forms, and interactions. Nutrition science is historically dodgey.
  - hyperpallium2 4y ago
    ADD: rickets was common in England in the 17th century due to dietary changes, and it took a while for the cause and solution to be figured out: a legal requirement to fortify some foods with vitamin D. What rising disorders today are caused by dietary changes? Austism? Infertility? You'd think we'd be much quicker at finding a dietary cause today - unless the ones we haven't found yet are harder to find. One of the greatest health problems today has a obvious relationship to calories: obesity. Perhaps simply getting more calaries for the same mass of food is a factor? Or, maybe our feeling of hunger is triggered by a lack of nutrients other than calories? So we eat and eat but are not satisfied.
- oofbey 4y ago
  Diet research is super hard. But the current consensus is that nutrients are best obtained from natural sources.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

irthomasthomas 4y ago

There was a study shared here, a while ago, that found total nutritional content remained the same while total yields increased. In other words, all the efforts to increase yield have, so far, only increased the water content of the produce. Our vegetables, today, are fatter, but less nutritious. I expect this development will be similar.

kaiwen1 4y ago
> Good nutrition was one reason: Isotopic tracers revealed the plants with extra copies of OsDREB1C took up extra nitrogen through their roots and moved more of it to the shoots. Extra nitrogen -> more protein (not water).
jimmygrapes 4y ago
Interesting anecdote: ever since "supply chain issues" became a thing, my local big name grocery stores (Kroger, etc.) have had much smaller but much more flavorful produce as they've resorted to sourcing more locally. Also more expensive, at first, and they go bad/get bruised much faster than they get sold, so they get marked down back to affordability within a few days of a shipment, until there are none left and the cycle repeats. I can't say I mind the change.

osigurdson 4y ago

I think we should try to do more with automation to produce food more cheaply. I’d rather have a zillion little robots clipping weeds than spraying roundup on GMO roundup resistant crops to achieve the same effect. A farmer’s job should be to press one button in the spring.