GMO foods

[magnemoe]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2172467/Surely-thats-discomfort-food-Forget-chocolate-meet-woman-gorges-STONES-shes-feeling-down.html

  Reveal hidden contents

The natural inorganic food.

Water is also inorganic  

[TheSaint]

2 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Water is also inorganic  

So is salt.

[kerbiloid]

So, they reject water and salt?

[cubinator]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

So, they reject water and salt?

No, just pay more than they should.

[Shpaget]

This article presents another aspect and source of dislike for GMO.

https://qz.com/africa/1900035/the-lie-of-monsantos-genetically-modified-cotton-in-burkina-faso/amp/

tldr, Monsanto is not the most honest and transparent company out there.

[Guest]

Yup, it's the same people who tried to put DRM (well, GRM, I suppose) into their maize seeds. Monsanto is basically the EA of agribusiness. This is the expected result of trying to deal with them, the only thing they're going to engineer are things that are good for their bottom line. Of course it's cheaper to make a crappy engineered cotton and fabricate the studies than to make one that'll actually improve on the regular kind.

This is not an argument against GMO, but against Monsanto, and other companies that think that just because they're dealing with a poor African country, they can exploit the people there (sadly, this is often true, at least for a while). Genetic engineering, just like any other kind, can be used to either make cheap crap, or more expensive, but solid product. Absent any oversight, corporations will always peddle the former as the latter.

[sh1pman]

On 9/6/2020 at 10:21 AM, Dragon01 said:

Yup, it's the same people who tried to put DRM (well, GRM, I suppose) into their maize seeds. Monsanto is basically the EA of agribusiness. This is the expected result of trying to deal with them, the only thing they're going to engineer are things that are good for their bottom line. Of course it's cheaper to make a crappy engineered cotton and fabricate the studies than to make one that'll actually improve on the regular kind.

This is not an argument against GMO, but against Monsanto, and other companies that think that just because they're dealing with a poor African country, they can exploit the people there (sadly, this is often true, at least for a while). Genetic engineering, just like any other kind, can be used to either make cheap crap, or more expensive, but solid product. Absent any oversight, corporations will always peddle the former as the latter.

If we really want to improve the existing food crops, it has to be done outside of corporate labs and without corporate funding. Possibly against certain corporations’ interests even. Crowdfunded GMO lab? I’d apply to that!

[Incarnation of Chaos]

Firstly; this thread wasn't what i expected. And that's a good thing xD

Secondly what would be stopping you from taking the next step and modifying the plant's cells to replicate faster? If it's just taking excess water up into it's cells and expanding the cell membrane/wall, then i could definitely see that being an issue for taste. You could also potentially look for the sequences that coded for the chemicals known to produce distinctive taste/smell/etc. and wack duplicates in there. There's also a third option, which would likely be the best. You could see why the plant was uptaking water and retaining it instead of using it for further division, and "Short-circuit" those pathways to cause it to encourage cell division after a certain threshold (There IS a reason plants like to retain water).

Is it literally just "We wanted bigga fruit, we got bigga fruit, we stop" and there isn't any money in further exploration or is it something else? Plants are some of the most well-characterized organisms we have genetically, and they're not too difficult to modify especially with modern tools. You'd still need to look out for unknown/dangerous side effects, but that's why we test in the first place.

[Guest]

The thing is, to actually make biomass, as opposed to bloating them with water, would require effectively increasing the cellular metabolism. This is a very complex mechanism that we don't fully understand, and it's pretty well optimized already. If the plant could grow faster, it would, because evolution tends to favor fast-growing plants. Also, a faster-growing plant would use more resources from the soil. It would therefore have to be supplied those resources, if we were to speed metabolism up further, it would likely be by heavy fertilization. The plant also has to be able to pull those resources from the soil faster. This isn't a trivial matter for anything but water. Then, there's a matter of sunlight. For faster growth, you need more energy. This means more surface area for collecting sunlight (forget about trying to improve photosynthesis, it's a miracle it works at all, and it's way too finicky to mess with). This means the plant can't be planted as densely, and biomass is needed for growing the large leaves. Unless the leaves are edible (not the case with vast majority of crops), this is a waste, and it bites into any gains you got from an increased metabolism. 

Biology is hard, bioengineering is harder. Millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of selective breeding went into producing the crops we have. Pushing them even further with deliberate engineering is very hard. And expensive. Flavoring might be doable, but by no means trivial.

[KerikBalm]

On 9/4/2020 at 5:21 PM, TheSaint said:

So is salt.

I once had a guy try to sell me "organic" salt while my wife and I were on vacation in Croatia. I started asking him about how that can be possible and such. He wasn't so fluent in English, and my wife told me to just say no thanks and leave the "poor guy" alone.

I think he was selling minimally processed sea salt. I think people equate "organic" with "natural", people used to say all natural back in the 90's, whatever happened to that (even though aresenic, and uranium, are also all natural)?

[cubinator]

My first thought on trying to get plant cells to replicate faster: It's going to get hot, just because of physics. A lot of proteins operate in a certain range of temperatures, and most of the time organisms are built to operate in the actual most efficient temperature range for their proteins. (I realize plants are cold-blooded, but take your own body temperature as an example. If you go into a fever, you won't feel great because your proteins are losing efficiency and some may even start to break.)

So just trying to get the plant to 'go faster' wouldn't work. Maybe there's a few other things you could get around a little bit, but not easily.

[KerikBalm]

33 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Biology is hard, bioengineering is harder. Millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of selective breeding went into producing the crops we have. Pushing them even further with deliberate engineering is very hard. And expensive. Flavoring might be doable, but by no means trivial.

Well, for specific things, its relatively easy, like golden rice.

Improving the efficiency of a system that has already been evolving for billions of years towards optimal efficiency? Not easy, perhaps impossible unless something is stuck in a local optima.

[Guest]

39 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Well, for specific things, its relatively easy, like golden rice.

Making bioengineered stuff may be relatively easy, but designing it is not, outside a few obvious cases. That's what I meant by "bioengineering is harder" (otherwise, it's really biomanufacturing). Even figuring out how to splice GFP into things was an achievement at the time. Every new modification is a serious research project.

One thing that, perhaps, could be done with efficiency is optimizing for nutrient-rich, 24/7 illumination, high CO2 conditions. This is far outside the realm of anything that's ever existed in nature, but easily done in a greenhouse with artificial lighting. You could also dispense with various adaptations to survive suboptimal conditions. Of course, the result would be fragile and unable to survive on its own, but if it's designed for greenhouses anyway, that shouldn't be too bad.

Edited September 7, 2020 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

If we want to make those lazy cropz to grow faster, first of all we should stop them from wasting the time and the energy on growing various useless organs.
Like the leavez, flowerz, rootz, and the stem.

This, in turn, makes us to make them actually unicellular.

But why need various unicellular crops when they grow in standard conditions, do not suffer from frost or from drought?
Do we actually need every nutrition component to be grown when they can be produced out of limited set of chemical compounds?
No, we do not.

So, we should take some algae and turn it into GMO-algae producing a limited basic set of compounds, from which we can synthesize whatever we want.

Basically, we should have two sorts of GMO-algae:

• for proteins (just because it's too tricky to synthesize them directly from inorganic compounds), say GMO-chlorella or/and GMO-spirulina;
• for cellulose (just because almost everything but proteins can be relatively easily manufactured out of cellulose via several intermediate compounds, and the photosynthesis looks like the easiest way to produce the cellulose).

They should be GMOed to make them produce the optimal ratio of compounds.

***

But can we eat (and drink) only plants?

Yes. No. Yes, but do it yourself.

We also need meat.

(Who doesn't need, he may not eat.)

***

But can we eat the protein made of algae?
No. They tried, and it's worse than outdated fastfood.

So, we should feed the algaic(?) protein to pigs to get the animal meat.

***

In its turn, the animal meat should grow without hooves, bones, hair, horns, brains, large sad wet eyes, and other useless parts.
It should grow like a meaty meat.

How should we make the pig grow no horns?
We should make the pig grow like a piece of pork. I.e. we should make the pig unicellular and grow it in a similar vat, feeding with (food? fertilizer?) made of the mentioned GMO-algae.

Here we come to the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat

Spoiler

We should grow a standard set of basic protein pastes composed from GMO chimeras of edible animals (pig+rabbit+tuna, hen+cow+cricket or whatever you need).

***

So:

1. Vats with cellulose-GMO-algae produce cellulose from air, water, and light.
2. The cellulose gets chemically made into sugars, fats, ethanol, whatever. Also colorizers, sweeteners, aromizers, plastificators, leaveners, and so on.
3. These are chemically turned into fertilizer.
4. Vats with protein-GMO-algae consume the fertilizer and produce required set of protein mixes.
5. Out of the the algaic protein and other things listed above we make a nutrition for the cultured meat. (I.e. for unicellular chimeric GMO pork-you-pine growing in the vat).
6. The GMO-meat cells consume the nutrition and grow, and we make protein mess of several basic compositions.
7. According to the standard recipes, we compose a standard set of basic food pastes (like "The standard foodpaste #234. Average standard 20%-lipid henpork with cola extract")..
8. Make food out of these food pastes and apply aromizers, colorizers, etc, to get what exactly we need. And of course, sodium glutamate, it's by definition.

9. Make the 5G-powered food combines which make foods from the cartridges of the standard components, according to the wikicookbook recipes.
10. Integrate all kitchen devices into a standard robokitchen set (as anyway, choosing between LG and Samsung microwaves is just a nasty showing off, they all are equal.)
11. Lease the social houses/flats with the robokitchen food production matching the payment plan on the customer's choice. From the welfare'rs to the i'm'fine'rs, i.e. from the basic set of food from the basic social income, to the premium-class food for additional payment units, as the kitchen doesn't care what to cook, it's the same for her, just recipes and materials differ.
12. As the robokitchen tycoon, collect the food wastes in the robokitchens as well, and remove them several times per day, together with the paste cartridges resupply.
So, your customers don't buy food, they rent the availability of the total cycle of food service on the corresponding payment plan.

13. Tools. As less as possible. So, take a cooked foodstick, put in paste, eat, utilize the single-use cellulose cap. May Ronald McDonald bless you.
Do not sort the organic wastes, it's idiotism. Any human wastes should be considered contaminated and should be totally destroyed and used for the new food production.

This needs energy. The energy is. It's deuterium fusion. Anyway all of this won't happen right tomorrow.
Ok, ok, solar panels are nice, too.

Edited September 7, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Incarnation of Chaos]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

The thing is, to actually make biomass, as opposed to bloating them with water, would require effectively increasing the cellular metabolism. This is a very complex mechanism that we don't fully understand, and it's pretty well optimized already. If the plant could grow faster, it would, because evolution tends to favor fast-growing plants. Also, a faster-growing plant would use more resources from the soil. It would therefore have to be supplied those resources, if we were to speed metabolism up further, it would likely be by heavy fertilization. The plant also has to be able to pull those resources from the soil faster. This isn't a trivial matter for anything but water. Then, there's a matter of sunlight. For faster growth, you need more energy. This means more surface area for collecting sunlight (forget about trying to improve photosynthesis, it's a miracle it works at all, and it's way too finicky to mess with). This means the plant can't be planted as densely, and biomass is needed for growing the large leaves. Unless the leaves are edible (not the case with vast majority of crops), this is a waste, and it bites into any gains you got from an increased metabolism. 

Biology is hard, bioengineering is harder. Millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of selective breeding went into producing the crops we have. Pushing them even further with deliberate engineering is very hard. And expensive. Flavoring might be doable, but by no means trivial.

That's all completely reasonable. I'm by no means a biologist, so I was pretty sure that it wasn't ever as simple as "make plant go fast" but this was an absolutely fantastic reply!

[Guest]

Well, I am a biophysicist, with a particular interest in genetic side of things, so I've had to learn about how exactly plants do what they do. They're really fascinating things, and no less "advanced" than other lifeforms.  Photosynthesis, in particular, is a ridiculously complicated thing which occurs under conditions that most Earth life couldn't live in (basically, a hot acid bath), yet they're found, in small pockets, in pretty much all plants. You really have to beat the crap out of the CO2 molecule to pull that carbon out of it.

In fact, the process is such a crock that 25% the time, it grabs the wrong molecule, and tries to pull a carbon out of O2. The result wastes water, energy and carbon. In fact, that's one thing you can do to photosynthesis to improve it, and scientists are working hard on implementing a system to prevent it in rice. Nature, of course, did it first, but only in plants that grow in hot climates, such as maize (the hotter it is, the more likely it is that an O2 molecule will be taken in instead of CO2), which incidentally is what makes it a feasible proposition, they're basically trying to put photosynthesis machinery from maize into rice. It's really hard, of course, which is why it didn't happen yet, but it could potentially greatly improve rice yields. That said, even that's not all that clear, because photorespiration (the "wrong molecule" process) might have a role in pulling nitrates from the soil, as well. Look up C3 and C4 plants (rice is the former, maize is latter) if you want to know more.

Edited September 7, 2020 by Guest

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

The thing is, to actually make biomass, as opposed to bloating them with water, would require effectively increasing the cellular metabolism. This is a very complex mechanism that we don't fully understand, and it's pretty well optimized already. If the plant could grow faster, it would, because evolution tends to favor fast-growing plants. Also, a faster-growing plant would use more resources from the soil. It would therefore have to be supplied those resources, if we were to speed metabolism up further, it would likely be by heavy fertilization. The plant also has to be able to pull those resources from the soil faster. This isn't a trivial matter for anything but water. Then, there's a matter of sunlight. For faster growth, you need more energy. This means more surface area for collecting sunlight (forget about trying to improve photosynthesis, it's a miracle it works at all, and it's way too finicky to mess with). This means the plant can't be planted as densely, and biomass is needed for growing the large leaves. Unless the leaves are edible (not the case with vast majority of crops), this is a waste, and it bites into any gains you got from an increased metabolism. 

Biology is hard, bioengineering is harder. Millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of selective breeding went into producing the crops we have. Pushing them even further with deliberate engineering is very hard. And expensive. Flavoring might be doable, but by no means trivial.

This, now we have done amazing thing with selective breeding simply by selecting for plants with large seeds or large fruits with small to no seeds in them. 
Yes part of this has been to make wheat be shorter as they are in an field with just wheat it don't need to grow very tall. 
The saved height can be used for more grains. 

Not always been the case.

 

[kerbiloid]

Why did the Ancient Egyptians on the photo grow the plants in the rooms with such low ceilings, so they have to bow?

Edited September 7, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Shpaget]

4 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I once had a guy try to sell me "organic" salt while my wife and I were on vacation in Croatia.

On behalf of all Croatians, I apologize if he was trying to scam you. It may have been the case that he was genuine, albeit misguided. We do have three salt producing facilities in Croatia that use traditional methods (ie. put sea water in shallow pools and let the water evaporate), so he might have had those in mind. As for "organic", the only thing organic would be the seagull droppings, guaranteed to be well preserved in brine and salt, and safe for consumption.

46 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Why did the Ancient Egyptians on the photo grow the plants in the rooms with such low ceilings, so they have to bow?

Have you never made an underground farm in Minecraft?

[Scotius]

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Well, I am a biophysicist, with a particular interest in genetic side of things, so I've had to learn about how exactly plants do what they do. They're really fascinating things, and no less "advanced" than other lifeforms.  Photosynthesis, in particular, is a ridiculously complicated thing which occurs under conditions that most Earth life couldn't live in (basically, a hot acid bath), yet they're found, in small pockets, in pretty much all plants. You really have to beat the crap out of the CO2 molecule to pull that carbon out of it.

In fact, the process is such a crock that 25% the time, it grabs the wrong molecule, and tries to pull a carbon out of O2. The result wastes water, energy and carbon. In fact, that's one thing you can do to photosynthesis to improve it, and scientists are working hard on implementing a system to prevent it in rice. Nature, of course, did it first, but only in plants that grow in hot climates, such as maize (the hotter it is, the more likely it is that an O2 molecule will be taken in instead of CO2), which incidentally is what makes it a feasible proposition, they're basically trying to put photosynthesis machinery from maize into rice. It's really hard, of course, which is why it didn't happen yet, but it could potentially greatly improve rice yields. That said, even that's not all that clear, because photorespiration (the "wrong molecule" process) might have a role in pulling nitrates from the soil, as well. Look up C3 and C4 plants (rice is the former, maize is latter) if you want to know more.

Finding a way to transplant nitrogen-fixing ability from bacteria to plants, would be a great way to reduce need for soil fertilization. Certainly it would increase yield on sandy, nitrogen poor soils.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Shpaget said:

Have you never made an underground farm in Minecraft?

Got it... You're right.

And the light looks like the rooms are enlightened with torches...

Also this explains why they made everything cubic.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Why did the Ancient Egyptians on the photo grow the plants in the rooms with such low ceilings, so they have to bow?

And we have the first example of cartoon logic.
Or rather most are bend over as they do farm work. and the artist wanted to push as most inside the area he was given as he could. 
Still the plants are high, now high plants might be an sign of an good harvest rather than non optimized crops. As with weak soil and and bad year its tiny. 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pgQfOXRsp4UKrI8q0zjXQ had an video about this and errors in movies and some scenes from gladiator and nobody thought about. 
Grain was higher, roads would look different, the road shown was probably an road up to some fields used by tractors. 

[kerbiloid]

3 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Or rather most are bend over as they do farm work. and the artist wanted to push as most inside the area he was given as he could. 

My first hypothesis was that they are stealing the pharaoh's crops and trying to hide behind the Egyptian bonsai trees.

But then I got that I'm wrong because the rightmost couple is plowing.

[Guest]

31 minutes ago, Scotius said:

Finding a way to transplant nitrogen-fixing ability from bacteria to plants, would be a great way to reduce need for soil fertilization. Certainly it would increase yield on sandy, nitrogen poor soils.

Nature is already way ahead of you. Specifically, it puts together plants and bacteria in a symbiotic relationship. There are plants which have bulbs on their roots in which those bacteria live, they do exactly what you describe, while remaining separate organisms. Given that, adding the ability to form such bulbs and enter symbiosis with bacteria would be easier. However, it's generally easier to shovel nitrate fertilizer over the plants than to engineer them to pull nitrogen from the air. Any serious agricultural operation already uses tons of the stuff. The only thing this could help with in practice is agricultural runoff (and then, it's not nitrate that's the biggest problem with it).

Edited September 7, 2020 by Guest

[magnemoe]

Just now, kerbiloid said:

My first hypothesis was that they are stealing the pharaoh's crops and trying to hide behind the Egyptian bonsai trees.

But then I got that I'm wrong because the rightmost couple is plowing.

Again its an cartoon, the plowing scene is the next pane, now why are not the plow into the earth? Ancient Egyptian art looks weird as it don't look like we expect with 4K year more experience with art, and yes its stuff in stylized cartoons and more so in video games who will baffle our grandchildren more.