Or making the plant produce pesticide of its own, causing bugs to develop resistance to measures needed by organic farmers, and also dosing humans with what would otherwise be easily rinsed off.
As long as this technology is not used to prevent country farmers to store their own seed whenever they want, and make it only legal to purchase 'Monsanto approved' seeds, I am completely fine with this.
I'm looking forward to the day when we can collectively disentangle GMO from all of the other negative practices of big ag. I don't see a reason why responsible genetic modification can't be a part of a sustainable and equitable future agricultural system.
"Genetically modifying food to increase yield is good for the environment" is a true statement, but you're going to need an awfully good PR firm to persuade the public it's true...
Yeah exactly. And not only yield, but natural pest resistance, etc. I'm also imagining how genetic modifications might eventually be environmentally beneficial in the context of whole-ecosystem engineering if/when we ever move beyond a monocrop model, such as modifying native organisms to counter invasive species, etc. Admittedly a bit sci-fi currently but in principle possible!
The gene that was added is translated into a protein that floats around the cell doing the RNA demethylation. The plants already have other genes that produce proteins that did that, but adding another one has an effect.
I'm surprised the plant lives at all in that state... One would imagine RNA methylation is used for all kinds of logic and mechanisms in plant cells, so arbitrarily removing them all would break stuff.
It would be like a programmer saying "let's just comment out every line of code starting with "if" in the windows source code, and then see if it boots faster!
In dealing with methylation one doesn't add to or remove the "code" to synthesize any particular protein from the cell(s) of the organism, the DNA/genes per se remains intact. The process inhibits / allows synthesis of particular proteins from the genes/DNA.
Think of it like software -- by flipping an A/B Switch in software configuration you don't add to or remove from a program, you merely turn on/off certain features. Same with methylation -- it's the A/B Switch for protein synthesis, FWIU.
No, they are changing DNA, they are adding DNA code that does the demethylation of RNA.
It's like adding code to the compiler so it produces different assembly from the same higher level code. But it's still added code because the compiler itself is in the codebase.
No. The FTO gene from humans was inserted into the genome of these plants. That gene produced a protein that performs RNA demethylation, which isn't even epigenetics, because epigenetics is the set of extra stuff that happens on DNA, not RNA.
