From Science Daily.
The world is becoming overpopulated and climate change will lead to mass famine, if not for science riding to the rescue. Much like the greatest human being ever and his green revolution, the research of On Sun Lau, Xi Huang, Jae-Hoon Lee, Gang Li and Jean-Benoit Charron has set the stage for what may be the next great leap of agriculture needed to feed the ever-growing human species.
Manipulating Plants’ Circadian Clock May Make All-Season Crops Possible
“Farmers are limited by the seasons, but by understanding the circadian rhythm of plants, which controls basic functions such as photosynthesis and flowering, we might be able to engineer plants that can grow in different seasons and places than is currently possible,” said Xing Wang Deng, the Daniel C. Eaton Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale and senior author of the paper.
The trick they discovered involves the interaction between two types of genes, one which produces proteins during the day to repress the expression (if I am using that term correctly) of the night time events in the circadian cycle. Further research in this area could one day lead to high yield crops that could modified to thrive in areas of reduced or extended daylight outside the natural range of the species or have faster yield times.
Though students of Yale, I will note the nationality of the authors, while their work will aide all of humanity, it is sad for me to see how the U.S. continues to fall behind in fields where we once dominated. A continual reminder of the poor state of our education system and the science-phobia which pervades my culture, I should really learn to speak Chinese before too long but that’s a whole different rant for another day.
The team’s research appears in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Molecular Cell.
7 comments
Skip to comment form ↓
Lord Shplanington, Not A Frenchman
September 5, 2011 at 03:24 (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Too bad they’ll all be shot for interfering with God’s will.
chigau ( /(-_-)\™)
September 5, 2011 at 06:33 (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I look forward to being able to grow sweet potatoes at 53°N.
I don’t particularly care who lets me do that
Lorax
September 5, 2011 at 14:29 (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sadly, I do not see this as a long-term solution. Regardless of food as there are other limiting resources, we need to reduce the human population significantly, which means either changing the reproductive habits of people across the planet or ignoring the problem until we collapse. The number of people on the planet has exceeded carrying capacity and is only propped up by technology. I see this research as a potential stop gap measure so the population doesn’t collapse through starvation, war, and disease and give us the opportunity to reduce the population through intelligent reproductive decisions. Based on the flack Biden took for discussing this and the thoughtful decisions made in the US (my country) on reproductive education, I think we are more likely to collapse than change our habits at a species level.
BobApril
September 5, 2011 at 15:57 (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Lorax, in the long term, everything is futile. Stopgap solutions like this one may provide enough time for further stopgap solutions later. Ideally, enough of them will permit one or more of our cultures to stopgap us into colonizing space, at which point “long term” gets a whole lot longer, and a global disaster is no longer necessarily the end of our species. It’s looking more and more like those colonies are going to end up speaking Chinese…but I’ll take what I can get.
Or, who knows? Like you suggested, “the horse may learn to sing,” and we’ll learn to better regulate our population and manage our resources sustainably right here. I don’t have much hope for that, though. I agree with Heinlein, a species that stops growing is halfway to extinction.
chigau ( /(-_-)\™)
September 5, 2011 at 16:20 (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The biggest problems lie not in “carrying capacity” or “reproductive decisions” but in distribution of resources and the gap between rich and poor.
No amount of science fiction will fix that.
Dan K
September 6, 2011 at 09:25 (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wouldn’t this manipulation use up the nutrients in already overtaxed soil even faster? I’m just askin’.
Lorelei Infantino
April 29, 2012 at 23:18 (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Thanks for your post. I would like to say this that the very first thing you will need to conduct is find out if you really need credit repair. To do that you need to get your hands on a duplicate of your credit score. That should really not be difficult, because government mandates that you are allowed to have one no cost copy of the credit report annually. You just have to ask the right people. You can either look into the website for the Federal Trade Commission as well as contact one of the main credit agencies directly.