Red algae proteins grafted into tobacco double plant growth | Hacker News Reader

Red algae proteins grafted into tobacco double plant growth

news.cornell.edu

114 pointsgeox75 comments

Engineering an improved rubisco into the food supply (or the notional biological carbon capture stream) would significantly boost to the carrying capacity of our planet.

Alternatively, we could carry the same number of people while preserving more of the planet for wildlife and wilderness.

Good news. People are having less kids and population growth may reverse soon.

What are the chances this will result in more food for everyone?

Depends on how many soylent green factories we build in response to climate change.

This goes back to my theory that the people most freaked out about climate change are the ones with kids, who are mad that other less responsible people have more kids, while I'm just chilling here with no kids at all and clearly see that if all those assholes stopped having kids, climate change would be solved within 20 years.

Married vegetarian with no kids living in a major city with no cars checking in — I completely agree.

Go Vegan! It’s easier than you think, especially since you live in a city. No judgements from me if you can’t/choose not to, it does take work. Just a bit of encouragement, and a thank you for making the compassionate and ecologically sound choice.

Climate change absolutely won't be solved in twenty years if everybody stops having kids. What's your logic there?

"if all those assholes stopped having kids"

So to save humanity, humanity must be destroyed?

Also, who do you think, will take care of you, when you cannot anymore, but there aren't people anymore doing it.

Robots? Well, hopefully they can take care of themself then. Or is this the whole idea? Pass everything on to the machines?

Then your money would be worth a ton due to deflation, but unable to purchase anything because the workforce is near non existent…

I’m happily child-free myself, but for natural reasons. I’ll let the breeders keep the Ponzi scheme going.

In developed countries..

All countries. It just takes a while before the effects kick in.

Exactly, we're all in this together. There is only one Earth and the only way to move forward is to work together and help each other out.

International politics does not need to be a zero sum game, a little bit of mutual assistance can go a long way.

No, India and China are both below replacement rate. Most of South America is. Rates are evening out in sub Saharan Africa as well.

This is a misconception that should be corrected. Fertility rates are falling everywhere, even in places with the current highest rates like sub-Saharan Africa: https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...

Probably not fast enough. To actually come back to the population we have today would take a really long time.

Population caps out at 10b and begins to decline again around 2100. That's the current projections.

Which means 2 centuries before we get back to 7 or 8.

Don't worry, climate change will speed that right up

I do worry, because the ones that die will not be the ones who reaped the benefits and remain nonchalant about it today.

UN projections, which are on the "business as usual" side of things.

Plenty of events, like the pandemic, which put immense downward pressure on fertility.

Also, the African continent is a net food importer. This could be turned around - particularly by Nigeria, which has the natural resources to produce fertiliser, but so far the observed effect has been a surge (+65%) of imports.

With the situation in Ukraine being what it is, I don't think this is sustainable.

Niger is currently experiencing a population explosion, which will force it to implement the same policies as Kenya to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe.

Going too fast will cause other issues. Unless we get a decent world war or another covid going the elderly aren't just going to drop dead.

I fear that a 'decent world war' nowadays may include nukes, so damage to the environment will be great. As an example, the dam that was destroyed in Ukraine and flooded a 'small area' (considering the planet-scale)(https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kakhova-dam-ukraine-russia-1.6...).

Which (your post and my thinking of a response) reminded me of the series: Aftermath - Population Zero (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1264068/); I remember watching some series back in the day.. I think it's time to watch this again.

EDIT: I found it on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l11zPNb-MFg

I'm slowly starting to realise that nukes are very unlikely to be involved simply because the selfish shits who start and run the wars know they personally won't survive if they start the nuke match.

Nobody's growing corn in the mountains.

The Great Plains also count(ed) as wilderness and have wildlife. Just because it’s not as picturesque doesn’t mean it isn’t an important ecosystem.

That's impossible. We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize. We've just taken too much too quickly. In the oceans for example there's population collapse of entire genera in different locations every single year and entire dexoygenated dead areas in the photic zone because of overfishing and damage caused by commercial fleets. According to the IUCN Red List there have been at least ten extinctions every year for the past thirty years. It doesn't help that there's a rivalry going on between which country can post the highest numbers for a mostly meaningless metric in GDP, causing deforestation for livestock, overfishing for export, monocultures spreading dozens of miles for crops that have a fifty percent chance of being burned to preserve prices, and so much mining entire mountain ranges disappear.

> We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize

I mean the article states the tobacco photosyntesized twice as effectively, with RsRubisco, which is actually less efficient the GmRubisco. So food-wise it seems hypothetically achievable.

I agree we'd need massive conscious degrowth in every other part of the economy though.

The trouble is you need a ton of water and fertilizer to support that growth, and drought combined with soil quality degradation is already a huge problem in a lot of regions, and will only become moreso as the globe warms and, p.s., fertilizer production is heavily dependent on petrochemicals and contributes to CO2 emissions.

It could be a huge development, no doubt, but there are many bottlenecks in agricultural production, so we need to be careful not to oversell this as some kind of panacea.

Would it take more water and fertilizer per pound of crop? If not, then that's a wash.

The claim was this technology would increase carrying capacity. That implies growing more food, not growing the same amount of food on less land.

I agree, as far as being able to use less land for agriculture, this could be a beneficial development. Only problem is that's not how humans typically work.

So after Tomacco we now have Algacco?

Tomalgae

If we're tuning algae to make fun molecules why stop at (or start with) nicotine? How about meth? THC?

I know which I'd rather see escape into the wild again. Methed up sharks all over the shorelines or stoned ones? The choice is easy.

Of course if we can get them to make a stable LSD then the sharks and the squids will be coming ashore to do song and dance routines for us.

unless i'm reading your implication wrong, sounds like you prefer sharks with the munchies to sharks with bad teeth?

Good point: how do sharks behave on meth? We should demand $4 billion in federal funds to research the question forthwith.

Might need to block off sections of the ocean to control for the cocaine shark research (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-cocaine-shark...)

I wonder if drugs that affect humans affect sharks in the same way!?

What?! People poison is shark poison?!

ugh as if the biting isnt enough, now the sharks are gonna tell you their whole life story in magnificent detail before they take you legs off...

I can't help but notice the omission of cocaine.

“The taste of the ocean”

Man this one is gonna be hard to advertise

plant growth is not doubled yet, but this is still really neat.

“We’re not at the point where we’re outperforming wild-type tobacco, but we’re on the right trajectory,” Gunn said. “We only need fairly modest improvements to Rubisco performance, because even a very small increase over a whole growing season can lead to massive changes in plant growth and yield, and the potential applications span many sectors: higher agricultural production; more efficient and affordable biofuel production; carbon sequestration approaches; and artificial energy possibilities.”

They should blend it with tomatoes.

Mmm, Tomacco.

https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Tomacco

Red tobacco? Like in FarCry 6? :D

Or Tomacco in The Simpsons?

Why do they do these experiments in tobacco? Is it just easier?

Afaik it is standard model organism, much like the humble fruit fly.

Tobacco is one of a handful of plant "model organisms", basically meaning that we have a lot of studies already done and genetic / metabolic information about it available.

Scientists like using these when doing basic research of, e.g. gene function, because that wealth of prior information available reduces the amount of "unknown unknowns" to account for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_organism

So you are saying tobacco is the vegetal world equivalent of the mice !

Yep, it's easy to grow in quantity. It has a relatively large/complete plant genome and, I think tobacco mosaic virus was used to implant genes early on. Another plant often used is corn since as I remember it allows plasmids to be implanted for new proteins (and you can add more plasmids to increase production).

I think that would be Arabidopsis thaliana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabidopsis_thaliana

Tobacco isn't a model organism at all. Solacea genomes only really got sorted in the late 2010s. Its worth pointing out if you could do something in Tobacco you could have done it in Tomato or Potato, you know those crops that dont kill people globally but sustain them. Arabidopsis thaliana (a type of cress) is the small plant model organism, not because it's biologically significant, but because it had a tiny diploid genome that could be mapped early and it's easy to grow quickly in a lab and seeds fast.

Tobacco is a model organism because TMV is so easy to work with. You can grow tobacco to maturity quicky, transfect it with TMV, isolate the TMV and then transfect another generation extremely rapidly, with low effort, and you don't even need PPE really.

It's so easy to work with that chemists (who often suck at biology) use it as a model for supramolecular chemistry.

Benthy, maize, and arabidopsis are the three major plant models. Hundreds of labs specialize in benthy, thousands more use it. It is absolutely a model by any conceivable definition of the term.

One of the primary reasons it is a model is due to transient expression in the leaves via TMV. You can quickly assay many constructs on the same plant with a simple overnight experiment.

Sorry if I was unclear in my statement. I assumed, without access to the article, that this release is using "Tobacco" loosely to mean "some sort of Nicotiana", likely Nicotiana Benthamiana. Calling N. Benthi "Tobacco" is something I've seen in other press releases and popular descriptions of plant research.

Definitely not trying to suggest it's the only model plant! Like you said, Arabidopsis is huge, and there are other plants used commonly as well. Just pointing out that using N. Benthi / "Tobacco" in research is def not uncommon for some kinds of plant research. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18616398/

All that said, I'm not a plant biologist! I'm just an engineer who happened to work for a bit of time in Biotech, and is trying to continue learning about that field on the side, so feel to take my thoughts on this with a grain of salt or 2!

From the article

> Tobacco is the easiest land plant in which to manipulate Rubisco and so serves as the test case for developing a more efficient Rubisco that can be transferred to more agronomically relevant species, Gunn said.

Far Cry Six anyone?

For all plants available, why tobacco?

It’s a model organism in plant bio. Like drosphila/fruit flies or xenopus/frog or E.coli and candida

Its a plant, and:

"Tobacco is the easiest land plant in which to manipulate Rubisco and so serves as the test case for developing a more efficient Rubisco that can be transferred to more agronomically relevant species, Gunn said."

Call it Nicotiana instead!

FWIW it's a beautiful plant. I grow it every year just for the flowers, which have an amazing scent. A humid evening after a rain, the garden at night with the flower scent. Quite lovely.

I've tried curing and smoking the leaves, but without the right facilities it doesn't go too well and doesn't produce anything close to the quality of store bought pipe tobacco.

It is beautiful and a solid favourite here in the UK.

I never did try to smoke a garden grown nicotiana. Thinking back on it, I probably should have grown my own and really got to grips with it. When I gave up fags, they costed around £10.50 for a packet of 20 Lambert and Butler. Nowadays £11.95 (1)

I recently wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36925512

No pressure, but I do recommend not having to gasp for breath when you walk up a hill. It is a bit of a pain. To be fair, I'm not in the best of shape but my lungs are not what they were.

(1) https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/home-and-ents/tob...

No one reads the article I see.

They had already used all their poison oak in other experiments.

Couldn't get Triffids cuttings.

Great news for smokers, if this will one day result in cheaper cigarettes!

The government has been intentionally making tobacco expensive for a generation or more.

They regulated all the supplies to grow tobacco, making it all but impossible to profitably grow in the US. Then they added a bunch of tariffs on both supply and tobacco. Then they tax the hell out of the final product.

Cigarettes are super cheap without government interference

The tariffs on French and Spanish imports really sucked. The day Gauloises and Gitanes disappeared from the US was dark. I would pay $50 a pouch for that stuff if I could obtain it anywhere. I never come back from Europe without the maximum I'm allowed to bring in.

If only they did that for sugar

The US does have fairly steep tariffs on imported sugar. And subsidises domestic corn production. Hence why high-fructose corn syrup is found in nearly everything!

I wonder if you're getting downvotes because people think you're serious. Everyone who prides themselves on not smoking loves a chance to get a little classist dig at those who do.

Smokes ain't expensive because of the cost of tobacco, though. They're expensive because, like most vices, the demand is highly inelastic and governments can tax the hell out of them without pissing off anyone who matters (once the gentry and the middle class have been conditioned not to smoke - prior to that, they were handed out as rations).

I love smoking, and ideally all those taxes I pay would be going toward cancer research and health care subsidies, but in reality they just go to the budgets of nonprofits and a class of people whose job is to further ostracize anyone who enjoys tobacco.

Those taxes you pay are entirely about encouraging you and everyone else to smoke less, and it's one of a few interventions that supported by evidence.

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