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

https://www.science.org/content/article/supercharged-biotech-rice-yields-40-more-grain

by zeristor • 4 years ago

124 133 4 years ago

science.org

zeristor• 4 years ago

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

adrian_b4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

MonkeyMalarky2• 4 years ago

Is there much research into doing the same for non food crop plants? Like for trees with the goal of faster reforestation?

RealityVoid• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_b4• 4 years 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.

owl57• 4 years 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?

bilsbie2• 4 years ago

Worth asking but our time and land are still very important inputs that probably need to be the top considerations.

And sunlight is one of the biggest inputs which is free and constant.

bilsbie2• 4 years ago

The safety thing is a weird question. Why is eating one pattern of DNA more dangerous than another?

(Assuming you didn’t modify it to produce novel proteins, etc)

xwdv3• 4 years ago

It isn’t. And that’s why people who argue that GMO food is bad for you just don’t get it. It’s not the food that’s bad, it’s the business practices. The GMO food itself is perfectly fine to eat. In fact, humans have been genetically modifying food for centuries, we’ve just gotten much faster at it.

arcticbull• 4 years ago

I think it's fair to say eating one plant is not comparable with eating a different plant. Why is eating one pattern of DNA (rice) less dangerous than another (Castor beans, where ricin comes from)? I think that's pretty self-explanatory. They code for different proteins.

I think the answer is more that we have no reason to believe that these modifications introduced harmful proteins, and we tested it on animals and humans, and they were fine.

The problem I have with GMOs generally speaking is the business model of patenting, selling sterile seeds that put farmers on mandatory subscription model - and that frequently the only genetic modification is to make the crop resistant to pesticides and herbicides so you can soak the fields, sterilize them and kill everything else. Or all 3 at once, like RoundUp Ready corn and soy.

pulse7• 4 years ago

"Why is eating one pattern of DNA more dangerous than another?" => Because some plants/animals have poisons, which is encoded in their DNA...

dukeofdoom• 4 years ago

Generally people carve out potato blemishes, and blight spots, and rotten parts, and smelly parts and butchers will carve out cancerous growths. It's a standard practice, something that humans do, partly do to our sense of disgust. Our senses are not always correct, but most of the time it's a good survival adaptation to avoid rotten food and getting sick.

alexfromapex• 4 years ago

Or do these GMOs yield the around the same amount of nutrients which is the main desired output

gruez4• 4 years ago

Rice is pretty poor in micronutrients to begin with, so you're not missing out on much even if it was 50% lower.

photochemsyn3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

brigandish5• 4 years ago

Is there another situation where the words "fish", "antifreeze" and "strawberries" are used together to describe it and it doesn't sound weird?

I'd be surprised if there were.

vostok3• 4 years ago

When I've talked to anti-GMO people in real life, they seem to (1) be anti-Roundup and similar pesticides more so than literally anti-GMO or (2) be anti-IP laws that won't allow farmers to use seeds from their last crop.

photochemsyn3• 4 years ago

Well, your immune system is already capable of identifying and deleting cells that have escaped the normal cell cycle control and have become cancerous, but if there's damage to your immune system then it can lose that capability. Immune system damage can occur by many means: viral infections, chemical carcinogens, ionizing radiation, etc.

Using gene editing technology to repair your immune system using a human template wouldn't be transgenic technology and is probably a relatively safe use of CRISPR gene editing, for example. Throwing in some shark genes to see what happened, because some species of sharks don't seem to get cancer IIRC, that would not be such a great idea I don't think.

puchatek• 4 years ago

You and your clones are not gonna be spread around in nature and multiply uncontrollably. Also you and your clones are not gonna be eaten by predators and affect them in unforeseeable ways (i hope). Those differences matter to the people who worry about GMO technologies. The fact that the development is spearheaded by for-profit companies does not help either.

undersuit3• 4 years ago

Your immune system already fights cancer. Strawberries don't need to prevent their blood from freezing in the arctic.

Dylan168078• 4 years ago

Modifying my immune system to be able to fight cancer is "weird" too, right?

By adding genes? Definitely!

people using "weird" as a metric make me a bit uneasy about how much longer such treatments are going to be allowed.

It shouldn't. This is at most a concern for inheritable modifications.

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

If you were dying of cancer and told your doctor you planned on drinking a lot of tea I assume your doctor would be like "Yeah, sure - couldn't hurt." Drinking tea is not weird, lots of people do it, and there are no real risks because you're dying anyway.

On the other hand, if you were like "I'm a biohacker, I'm going to genetically modify a virus to infect me and alter my immune system." Then I assume the doctor would say "Hey, let me get some people to take a look at that." Because that is weird and there are risks.

"Weird" doesn't mean good or bad, it means unusual. Unusual things have the property that we don't do what they will cause, because they haven't been done much, because they are unusual. Genetic biohacking probably does have a greater chance of saving your life, or increasing your farm yields, but there are possible downsides to it that are not present in more mundane interventions.

kaiusbrantlee• 4 years ago

This is the kind of GMO that's generally considered fairly benign

not by me. The rpecautionary principle is not followed in any GM process so invasive.

Even breeding, which is a far less invasive form of genetic manipulation, has caused serious issues. The vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it, for example.

These kinds of long arc problems for the consumers of the food are not possible to track over anything but multiple generations (generations of the consumers of the food, not generations of the plants). They become all but impossible to track when the incentives of the systems at play essentially guarantee fuckery with regards to the gathering, interpretation, and dissemination of data that jepordizes profits.

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

The [pr]ecautionary principle is not followed in any GM process so invasive.

While that is true, the precautionary principle is also not followed in any other process. It can't be, because the precautionary principle is nothing more than the statement "never do anything, not under any circumstances".

feet3• 4 years ago

Why is a higher degree of invasiveness a bad thing?

jorblumesea• 4 years ago

Easy to say when you're not going hungry.

RosanaAnaDana4• 4 years ago

vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it

Citation please.

matthewmacleod• 4 years ago

The vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it, for example.

As far as I am aware, this is very much untrue. Modern agricultural practices have indeed resulted in lower levels of nutrition in many fruits and vegetables—there was a bit of chat about this earlier in the year—but to say it has been “bred out” is not accurate.

I’m no GMO hawk, but it seems entirely feasible that breeding or GMing produce to reduce dependency on various aggressive agricultural techniques offers the possibility of increasing the nutritional content of produce, rather then diminishing it.

bparsons• 4 years ago

Imagine if the precautionary principal had to be used for any other technology. We wouldn't have electricity, cell networks, airplanes or antibiotics. It is an impossible standard.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

These kinds of long arc problems for the consumers of the food

You always have to compare with the long arc problems by not making changes... Like the increased nitrogen runoff destroying ecosystems in lakes and oceans, and the reduced yield meaning humans on the margins die of starvation.

How many humans should we kill by starvation to be a little more cautious about deploying this tech?

iroh27272• 4 years ago

“Generally considered” may not be good enough given that that general considerment is corporately influenced (in terms of research funding, media, narratives inside the industry, etc.).

I mean, I’m not an expert, but altering the expression of genes already present could be hugely dangerous in theory. These expressions are based on extremely precise feedback loops and interrelationships.

I guess we could use a coding analogy: if you’re using a statically compiled language and you make a code change that compiles and makes the unit tests you have in place pass, it probably works. But it might not… and in this case, what are the risks of the “might not,” especially when we’re layering these modifications on top of each other? And do we need to take such risks?

scoopdewoop• 4 years ago

I'm really not a fan of Round-Up Ready GMOs, but breeding plants already alters their genes and gene expression. Horticulture has radically altered every food we eat. The natural world already can't sustain 7 billion people, there simply isn't enough nitrogen in the soil. Fertilizer is the reason you and I are alive right now, and its a huge source of greenhouse gasses, so yes, we do need to take such risks.

A better coding analogy would be genetic algorithms versus intelligent fuzzing and manually patching.

Gatsky• 4 years ago

This is an oddly anti-scientific view. We can test and evaluate the safety of the resulting GMO product.

Some of the most important and useful pharmaceuticals are GMO products, produced by genetically modified cells in bioreactors. Do you have an issue with those?

There is also the fact that we allow rampant and unregulated frankenfood production which is obviously harmful and purely profit driven (ie modern processed food production). But when it comes to GMO crops, which would improve the nutrition of the hungriest populations, suddenly it is too dangerous and must be banned. A privileged double-standard if there ever was one.

ramraj07• 4 years ago

If you’re from the field the only crucial pieces of info you need from a paper would be the abstract and materials section. You can pretty much impute everything else at least to replicate the work. So maybe that’s the reason.

mdf• 4 years 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/

xbar• 4 years ago

How much more Roundup is required?

hyperpallium23• 4 years ago

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

skybrian2• 4 years 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?

hyperpallium23• 4 years 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.

oofbey• 4 years ago

Diet research is super hard. But the current consensus is that nutrients are best obtained from natural sources.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 4 years ago

How would you know what kind of "nutrients" would you need to add?

We don't even know all the molecules that make up a single grain of rice. Do you think we've already discovered all the required nutrients for humans?

You don't want to end up like these cats: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-08-14-mn-805-st...

irthomasthomas• 4 years 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.

jimmygrapes• 4 years 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.

kaiwen1• 4 years 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).

osigurdson• 4 years 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.

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

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