GMO panic in 3.. 2.. 1..

It’s more important to uphold misguided principles than to feed the poor, so i’m fully expecting a drive to outlaw this somehow.

A strain of genetically modified rice has been developed to handle drought, salty soils and lack of fertilizer. The aim is to “climate-proof” rice farms in Asia and Africa so that they can grow the same variety each year, regardless of the conditions.

2022-05-04: Golden Rice

Golden Rice is just like our ordinary rice, but superior in the sense that it is enriched with beta-carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A as needed. The beta-carotene compound gives this grain its yellow-orange or golden color, hence its name. It is the first genetically engineered rice with nutritional benefit in the world, and the first in Asia to have been granted a biosafety permit for commercial propagation. The pilot-scale deployment of Golden Rice in the Philippines will open the door for the first direct community or public experience of Golden Rice in the world.

2022-07-21: 40% more yield

By giving a Chinese rice variety a second copy of one of its own genes, researchers have boosted its yield by 40%. The change helps the plant absorb more fertilizer, boosts photosynthesis, and accelerates flowering, all of which could contribute to larger harvests. Isotopic tracers revealed the plants with extra copies of OsDREB1C took up extra nitrogen through their roots and moved more of it to the shoots. The modified plants were also better equipped for photosynthesis; they had 33% more chloroplasts, the photosynthetic organelles within plant cells, in their leaves and 38% more RuBisCO, a key enzyme in photosynthesis.

2023-08-31: Adaptive immune systems for plants

Plants lack an adaptive immune system — a powerful system capable of detecting practically any foreign molecule — and instead rely on a more general immune system. Unfortunately, pathogens can rapidly evolve new ways to avoid detection, resulting in colossal crop loss. Using a rice plant as a model, scientists have bioengineered a hybrid molecule — by fusing components from an animal’s adaptive immune system with those of a plant’s innate immune system — that protects it from a pathogen. A proof-of-principle study modified a protein called Pik-1, one of the NLRs produced by a rice plant. The team replaced Pik-1’s ID region with an antibody fragment that binds to fluorescent proteins. Next, they exposed bioengineered and control (unaltered) plants to a pathogen (Potato virus X) that itself was genetically modified to express fluorescent proteins. The bioengineered plants showed significantly less fluorescence, suggesting that the NLR-antibody hybrid molecules produced by the plants successfully blocked the virus from replicating.

This technology could yield “made-to-order resistance genes” to protect crops against pathogens and pests.