One Lost Methyl Group = Huge Amounts of Food Production

blogs.sciencemag.org

24 points·Clewza313··8 comments

same topic, a few days ago:

" RNA demethylation increases rice and potato yields 50% "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27925250

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9

Given that plants growing at a faster rate due to increased CO2 seems to decrease their mineral density, I wonder if there is a similar effect here. There is no mention of micronutrient content in the original paper.

This isn't something to ignore, but rice and potatoes (the target crops for these edits) are grown as staple calorie sources, not really for their vitamin / mineral content.

It would be cool to combine this with golden rice and get truly nutritious cereal grains, but the main goal is to reduce hunger, and get micronutrients to populations in more efficient ways.

Neither the rice nor the potatoes showed changes in their starch, protein, total carbohydrate, or vitamin C content.

"Mineral density" and "micronutrients" are not the primary criteria by which we judge the quality of staple crops. There is no particular reason to suspect that your reasoning by analogy from CO2 to demethylation enzymes is valid.

I wonder if this can be used for non food plants as well. Can we implant it in trees to grow them much more quickly?

"Wood Formation in Trees Is Increased by Manipulating PXY-Regulated Cell Division"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25866390/

That's a different pathway, right?

I'm imagining someday we use both in bamboo and have massive forests that we continuously cutdown and use for construction and the leftover gets turned into biochar and either used to make more soil or to fill up mines with sequestered carbon.

Oh, yes. Related only in that it is messing with genetics to get more production.

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