Researchers find a new organelle evolving | Hacker News Reader

Researchers find a new organelle evolving

arstechnica.com

109 pointsWithinReason20 comments

Can we force the evolution of nitrogen fixing organelles in plants like soybeans, which can already fix nitrogen through symbiosis, by knocking out a couple of genes in the nitrogen fixing bacteria to force it to become more reliant on its host?

I can see that being patented, sold only to those that can pay, nearby farms that get pollinated with the gene being sued, the patenting company getting into financial trouble, the gene being banned to protect interests in the name of nature. You know, the usual story:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...

I can see it dramatically reducing the need for fertilizer, making farming cheaper and less polluting. I hope the patenting company does protect its IP and makes a ton of money from the good it would do for the world.

I’d also be fine with taxpayers paying for it getting developed at a university and just being free to use after that.

It would not pass the non-obviousness criteria. Both gene editing and the existence of pre-existing organelle are prior art, and combining those would be obvious to anyone in the field.

Creating a food crop plant that contains these organelles will be an incredible challenge. They will need to solve dozens of difficult technical problems. It is obviously non-obvious.

yes...but one click purchasing got patented (by amazon), while purchasing existed and so did clicks...

You might not get the patent on the whole concept, but you can probably get many different patents on the details needed to make it work.

Its probably more straightforward to introduce those genes into the plant directly

If nuclear dna is the source code then these cellular endosymbionts are similar to the attack in reflections on trusting trust.

They are not part of the source code, but rather a self-perpetuating feature of the compiled binary.

Literally encapsulation of your dependencies, which are provided as compiled modules. We can now call that "a tale as old as time".

This is exciting. I chat rocket fuel with my child quite often and he is into hydrolox from water. The other big alternative is methane from atmospheric CO2, but separating N2 could result in fuel with a bigger bang.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process was originally developed for fertiliser, but instead we've often used it (or similar pathways) to make the rubble bounce.

Yes, and this StackEx post gets a response about ammonia that quotes Clark's Ignition: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22758/reasons-why-...

AFAIK, IANAExpert, Haber process is very energy intensive and centralized. It would be helpful to crack the N2 in a more distributed manner and harvest the results and maybe in a more rocket friendly molecule than ammonia, like APCP feedstock.

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

Wrong post?

No, but maybe more context would help folks not reading the article: A "nitroplast" converts nitrogen from the air to a chemically useful form.

Basically any energy store receives inputs and then performs controlled outputs. In the case of subterranean hydrocarbons that was solar from long ago (without prejudice against geothermogenic theories). How can we take inputs from solar, wind, water movement, geothermal or nuclear and store it optimally for a particular task?

For most purposes various electrical charge or entropy change systems are sufficient. For purposes that require high energy density and high sustained release, chemical bond changes are optimal. Nitrogen is awesome for this purpose and so a biological process for storing solar energy in separated nitrogen bonds is exciting.

This is fascinating. Can someone recommend a book that goes into similar depth as this article covering these types of symbiotic relationships? Examples I can think of are:

- Organelles evolving from other living organisms as described in this article - Bacteria in and on our bodies - Fungal mycelium in relation to plants

I am sure there are many more.

I strongly recommend "The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life" by David Quammen

The old metaphor of a tree of life has completely broken down with crosslinks everywhere at all levels, far beyond what even Barbara McClintock wrote about.

It's not completely true (but in the area what is "completely true") that only the mitochondria and chloroplasts are captures or symbionts. Flagella and cilia are examples of others! Though technically they aren't considered organelles.

The book I mentioned above is really good! It doesn't simply talk about how current understanding has momved beyond the tree metaphor, it talks about how that came about, as well. Of course, being a book for the general public at talks a lot about the people involved too.

I Contain Multitudes, by Ed Yong

https://edyong.me/i-contain-multitudes

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake discusses this topic in some detail with respect to Fungi.

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