Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I am genuinely excited that we may have found a way to protect Banana's future and clearly the way they developed this was the right way to do it.

But I am not looking forward to the anti-science folks vilifying this since the way I am reading this is that it is an GMO? Or did they just use the genetic tools to figure out what to breed in a traditional way?

If every single banana is GMO it is going to really set off some conspiracy theorists.

I really wish this anti-gmo thing never got enough traction for there to be laws requiring labeling. It has gotten to the point that if a product proudly claims its "non gmo" I will not buy it if I have a choice.

View on HN

The article states "Yelloway One is the product of conventional breeding techniques." and that [...]"modern DNA analysis technology to accelerate the process of developing resistant banana varieties. This allowed them to select new varieties with desired traits, such as disease resistance, more quickly and efficiently"

I think that means it's non-GMO and shouldn't cause a kerfluffle.

It also shows how thin the line between “bred” and “genetically modified” is if you can rapidly check what you bred.

They knew what DNA sequence they wanted to see in this banana, rolled the dice by breeding some banana variants, sequenced the DNA of those variants, selected the variants closest to their goal, rolled the slightly loaded dice they got from round 1 to get more variants, sequenced those to get dice that were loaded slightly more, etc.

With traditional breeding you grow the plants and check how well they do. That takes way more time than growing them until you can breed with them.

You also can’t easily take a path that includes variants that are very weak, and will hardly grow. This method likely is better in that regard.

The line is pretty thick. For selective breeding, the end result still needs to be capable of consecutive propagation. The seeds you select have to be grown into a full plant that actually exists and then produces its own viable seeds and it has to do this for multiple generations. With GMOs, being able to DRM the seeds is widely considered a feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com