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Comment by technotony | Hacker News Reader

The next step is optimizing the plants to grow better in these greenhouse conditions - currently the plants waste lots of energy. For example my company, TAXA Biotechnologies[1], has identified a gene that doubles the rate of growth of lettuce per unit light energy. It wouldn't work in the wild as the cost is reduced pest-resistance but growing indoors there are other ways to control that. [1]www.taxa.com

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Optimize for taste, not for fast growth, please. I don't want to pay for lettuce with taste of straw.

Last time I checked (it's been a while since I had a salad), lettuce already doesn't have too much of a taste. I'd be surprised if they managed to mess that up.

It really depends on the lettuce.

Iceburg seems to be intentionally useless. Romaine starts to have a little flavor. Leaf lettuces have a wide range of flavors.

Iceberg is a texture, not a taste per se. Used in combination with other greens and veggies it has a place.

is that the outcome of nature or selective breeding?

Moving to California recalibrated my understanding of lettuce/salad greens. Not sure if you meant just lettuce, but in California a typical salad has little to no lettuce, and instead: mizuna, arugula, radicchio. What lettuce is does have is Romaine and butter lettuce, not iceberg.

The result is a very flavorful salad- intensely bitter with much less crunch.

Yes, this is a must. I wonder if industrial greenhouses could benefit from some sort of induced day-night cycles and thermal gradients to cuddle the little plants. Maybe it will allow them to grow better and to develop a better taste. Once you have LEDs possibilities are many.

Taste is a really difficult thing to optimize for due to the subjective nature. There are certainly specific chemicals that appear in really tasty food that can be analyzed and used to guide the breeding process but it's incredibly complicated.

Optimizing for anecdotal data is one of the things I'm working on, it's amazing the depth you need in selecting specific traits to breed into plants.

>Taste is a really difficult thing to optimize for due to the subjective nature.

No one tastes locally grown produce and thinks, "this is OK, but I really prefer the flavor of the produce that's genetically engineered to not bruise as easily in shipping."

Well yeah absolutely, I'm saying it's a qualitative trait as opposed to yield per acre which is quantitative.

Yeah dude, you should convince them to waste the opportunity to make billions.

You think billions is cool.... No, thousands is cool.

If you're going to for taste then maybe go for another salad than lettuce though :)

Seems like you haven't tasted great lettuce! Try one grown in Finland, it'll blow your mind. I miss Finnish vegetables more than anything else!

Or maybe I have and I can recognize that lettuce is one of the blandest greens around. Treviso, watercress, frisée, oak-leaf have way more taste and also offer better texture.

I'm not optimistic here. At scale, cost always wins. Look what Hershey did in the US to its brand also Cadbury when they licensed it: that pasty brown wax is just not appealing compared to the real thing.

http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2008/09/chocolate-cocoa-butter...

There is a lot that can be done to optimize plants genetically, including a ton that can be done with selective breeding. I'm working on a start up doing selective breeding software and it's amazing how much variety is available that isn't being tapped into yet. We're starting with cannabis breeding before moving into other crops but there is a ton of room for improvement in genetic stock.

Hey, I'd be very interested to hear more about this! Do you have a newsletter or something like that?

I had the idea that there is so much untapped potential in selective breeding of cannabis after reading about various terpenes and their medicinal properties.

The market's just been breeding for ridiculous THC levels (I daresay harmful levels - unfortunately I know several heavy smokers who have been institutionalized) without the CBD to balance it and without exploring the role of the other chemicals.

So I'm happy to hear that this is changing! (Like that news of a 15% CBD 1% THC strain from a few years back)

I wish you the best of luck!

To clarify on the last bit, I was thinking it would be great if the genetics from the new high CBD strains could be brought into the mainstream by crossbreeding with popular strains.

My interest in this has to do with the idea that in the 1970s, CBD and THC levels were both around 1%. THC has skyrocketed but CBD has not.

THC is known to trigger psychosis and paranoia in sensitive individuals, while CBD reduces anxiety and was found to be as effective as other anti-psychotics.

TL;DR too much sativa not enough indica :)

Hey, we don't yet could you email me patrick@growflora.co ? I'd love to talk about it more. We're onboarding some of our first breeders this upcoming week and have a grow journal beta out in the open.

nice to hear but more relevant to the thread would be info on precise photo active radiation spectra. The absorption is easily meassured putting a leaf under a through light spectroscope, but narrowing down the actually active spectrum is a different matter.

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