and you can bet your ass that scientific illiterates will find something to complain about this.
So it’s not particularly surprising that the company is introducing novel strains of familiar food crops, invented at Monsanto and endowed by their creators with powers and abilities far beyond what you usually see in the produce section. The lettuce is sweeter and crunchier than romaine and has the stay-fresh quality of iceberg. The peppers come in miniature, single-serving sizes to reduce leftovers. The broccoli has 3x the usual amount of glucoraphanin, a compound that helps boost antioxidant levels.
you don’t need desalination for agriculture if you go for plants that can tolerate salt water. there are 1000s of them.
More than 97% of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400K flowering plant species around the world, 2600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?
From the moment life gained a foothold on Earth the diversity of organisms has been written in a DNA code of 4 letters. The latest study moves life beyond G, T, C and A and introduces 2 new letters of life: X and Y.
and here’s P and Z:
Researchers have shown that 2 synthetic nucleotides called P and Z fit seamlessly into DNA’s helical structure, maintaining the natural shape of DNA. Moreover, DNA sequences incorporating these letters can evolve just like traditional DNA, a first for an expanded genetic alphabet. The new nucleotides even outperform their natural counterparts. When challenged to evolve a segment that selectively binds to cancer cells, DNA sequences using P and Z did better than those without.
more on Z and other noncanonical bases:
Z and other modified DNA bases seem to have evolved to help viruses evade the defenses with which bacteria degrade foreign genetic material. The eternal arms race between bacteriophages and their host cells probably provides enough selection pressure to affect something as seemingly “sacrosanct” as DNA. “Right now, everyone thinks the modifications are just protecting the DNA. People almost trivialize it.” But something more may be at work: The triple bond of Z might add to DNA’s stability and rigidity, and perhaps influence some of its other physical properties. Those changes could carry advantages beyond hiding from bacterial defenses and could make such modifications more broadly significant. After all, no one really knows how many viruses may have played with their DNA like this. “Standard genome sequencing methods for looking for biological diversity in nature would fail to find these, because we are looking in a way that assumes a common biochemistry that is not present.”
Scientists have synthesized an entire yeast chromosome, the first artificial chromosome for the kingdom of life that includes humans, plants, and fungi. Yeast with the artificial chromosome appeared to be just as happy as their “natural” counterparts, reports the team. The methods developed to create the designer genomic structure could help synthetic biologists better use the single-celled fungi as biological factories for chemicals like biofuels and drugs.
These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells — which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales — with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.
evolution works even if your tiny brain can’t believe in it: careful, massively parallel mutation of key enzymes, a fitness function, repeat for a few times, and you get a cheap and clean way to make complex compounds out of simple sugars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scientists estimate that among all the viruses that infect all the animals of the world there may be around 800K which could, in the right circumstances, jump from their habitual hosts into humans and start spreading. Could all of them be identified, too, and sentry posts set up that would provide news of their incursions? The Global Immunological Observatory would ideally test every tiny sample of blood for 100Ks of distinct antibodies. Considering how hard large-scale testing for just sars-cov-2 has proved, this might seem impossibly ambitious.
After the pandemic, there will still be new strains of flu and other viruses to code. There will be a backlog of sequencing work for cancer and prenatal health and rare genetic diseases. There will be an ongoing surveillance effort for SARS-CoV-2 variants. An even bigger job, moreover, involves a continuing project to sequence untold strains of microbes, a project that Ginkgo has been involved with in search of new pharmaceuticals.
now that sequencing is cheap, it will move out of the lab and in situ:
Multiple appliances could benefit from integration with sequencing
sensors, including air conditioning or the main water supply to monitor harmful pathogens
2022-05-04: Bill Gates on how to prevent the next pandemic. He also wrote a book about it. Strangely, he has a misplaced belief in the WHO, which completely failed us.
If we’re going to make COVID-19 the last pandemic, the world needs to get to work right away on 3 key areas:
1. Make and deliver better tools.
1 key step is to create a library of antiviral compounds that are designed to attack common respiratory viruses, so that we can more easily find out if an existing drug will work in the event of an outbreak. We should also expand incentives for generics manufacturers to create low-cost versions of new drugs. We also need to support work on new types of tests that make it easier to collect samples and turn around results quickly, like better versions of the rapid antigen tests that many of us now take at home for COVID or even handheld devices that health workers can use to easily test people in their community.
2. Improve disease monitoring.
Creating the GERM—Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization—team is one of the most important steps we can take to stop the next pandemic. GERM will play a crucial role in virtually every aspect of pandemic prevention, but improving monitoring will be the most significant part of their mandate.
3. Strengthen health systems.
There are steps that countries at every income level should consider, like improving primary health care and deciding in advance of a crisis who will oversee what. Governments and donors also need a global forum where they can coordinate action with poor countries.
By feeding biological data about the various types of bats — their diet, the length of their wings, and so on — into their computer, they created a model that could offer predictions about the bats most likely to harbor betacoronaviruses. They found over 300 species that fit the bill.
Since that prediction in 2020, researchers have indeed found betacoronaviruses in 47 species of bats — all of which were on the prediction lists produced by some of the computer models they had created for their study. It was striking the way simple features such as body size could lead to powerful predictions about viruses. “A lot of it is the low-hanging fruit of comparative biology”.
researchers have developed a new imaging technique that needs no dyes or other chemicals, yet renders high-resolution, 3D, quantitative imagery of cells and their internal structures using conventional microscopes and white light.
using a 50nm pipette to repeatedly sample from a living cell without killing it.
robotic nanobiopsy can extract tiny samples from inside a living cell without killing it. Single-cell nanobiopsy is a powerful tool for scientists working to understand the dynamic processes that occur within living cells
Gregor J. Rothfuss 