48
submitted 1 year ago by abobla@lemm.ee to c/science@beehaw.org
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 32 points 1 year ago

For those of you wondering how this is useful, tobacco is often used as a model organism in botany. The utility of this technique is less obvious in tobacco but more obvious in fruits, vegetables, etc. think seedless grapes, etc

Seedless grapes already exist, but I suppose you could now insert the gene into other plants/varieties to make those seedless as well.

I'm thinking more about how big ag companies could use this to prevent farmers from saving seeds/propagating a copyrighted variety (though I don't know if that's common with any crops where the seed itself isn't the end product) or maybe more charitably, preventing their copyrighted plants from cross pollinating neighboring fields of the same species (e.g. ruining that neighbor's non-gmo status).

Finally, this could be useful if it can be "switched on" i.e. by deliberately polluting an invasive plant's gene pool with this gene and then switching it on to stall the invasive's population growth. But I think most invasives are perennials, so would still need to be removed some other way.

[-] evilgiraffe666@ttrpg.network 18 points 1 year ago

It could be used for improving products, but really it'll be DRM for plants. That's what could make money so that's why money was spent.

[-] C4d@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thought this too. About to read the article; half-wondering whether I’ll see the likes of Monsanto or similar in amongst the study sponsors.

load more comments (9 replies)
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
48 points (100.0% liked)

Science

13006 readers
168 users here now

Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS