Posts Tagged ‘plants’
Suntory Creates Mythical Blue (Or, Um, Lavender-ish) Rose
Suntory, a Japanese company best known for its alcoholic beverages, has genetically modified a rose to give it an all-over color probably best described as lavender. The problem: roses lack a natural plant pigment known as delphinidin, which gives certain types of flowers, like geraniums and pansies, a blue color. Roses do not naturally have this pigment, but in 2004, Suntory finally managed to introduce a gene for blue pigment from a pansy into a rose. We're no stranger to , but this is the first time we've seen a mythical symbol created through the technique.
When I asked Yoshikazu Tanaka of Suntory what the inspiration for the project was, he said "The company wanted us to do something difficult, something nobody had achieved," and what project could be more difficult than an international symbol for impossibility? Of course, the rose really isn't "blue," though it is pretty, so I tried to politely ask if this was the color the team was going for. Mr. Tanaka told me that "every flower has its own way to be blue, with many different pigments. This is our first step: We will keep adding more pigments [to make the flower] more blue."
The rose, which Suntory has named "Applause," is in North America at select florists, tailor-made for the next impossible goal you achieve. Suntory's explanation for the name? It serves "as a symbol of congratulations for those whose dreams have come true, as well as of encouragement for those pursuing a dream, whatever it may be." Sniff. Go get 'em, blueish rose!
Fraunhofer Lab Debuts Healthful Ice Cream Made from Flowers Instead of Milk
It has no dairy, gluten, animal fats or protein, and it’s cholesterol-free, says Fraunhofer. The ice cream is now on sale at a German supermarket chain.
“Lupinesse,” as it’s called, is derived from the seeds of the blue sweet lupin, known in this country as lupine. They flower as tall, thin rods — Texas bluebonnet is a lupine, for instance. The blue sweet lupin, which is indigenous to Europe, has a particularly high-protein seed, which is important for developing a creamy consistency, Klaus Mueller of the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Freising, Germany, said in a . The protein also has cholesterol-regulating effects, he said.
Plant-based ice creams are obviously not a new idea — there are several types of soy, coconut and nut-based ice creams on the market, targeted for vegans and people with lactose intolerance. But this one is valuable because the plant protein has additional health benefits, and the plant itself has nitrogen-binding roots, so growing it can improve soil quality. Apparently lupin is considered the “soybean of the north” in Europe.
Scientists tried to produce food products from lupin in the 1990s, but they couldn’t make it work. The protein-rich seed of this particular lupin, plus a new production method developed at Fraunhofer Labs, made this new ice cream possible. It comes in Vanilla-Cherry, Strawberry-Mousse, Walnut Dream and Choco-Flake flavor. Too bad it has just as much fat as regular ice cream.
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Atomic Gardens, the Biotechnology of the Past, Can Teach Lessons About the Future of Farming
When radioactive tomatoes were the crop of the future
The innermost circle of plants, gathered around a central pole, were dead; slightly farther away, the plants were stunted and tumor-ridden; and past that, the plants may have looked right, but possessed strange new mutations.
It was the latter part of the archetypal “gamma garden” that most interested plant researchers in the 1950s and 1960s. The central pole contained a radioactive source, commonly cobalt-60, so that scientists could see how the gamma rays affected plants.
Before scientists learned how to modify genes, they induced mutations with radiation. It was a sincere effort to feed the world, and amaze home gardeners, by modifying plants to have desirable traits.
Nanotechnologist Paige Johnson shares the history of atomic gardening on her blog, . Writer Alexander Trevi interviewed Johnson for his own blog, Pruned.
“If we think of modern GM as taking a scalpel to the genome, mutation breeding by irradiation was a hammer,” she says. The full interview is well worth a read; .
It’s an interesting tale in light of radiation and food safety concerns after the Japanese nuclear disaster. But there are also some interesting parallels between atomic gardening and 21st-century biotechnology, which also promises to to have new traits. The promises, and the controversies, feel very familiar.
Back in the 1960s, scientists bombarded plants with gamma radiation hoping to see beneficial changes in the plants’ structure and yield. Advocates included entrepreneur C.J. Speas and Englishwoman Muriel Howorth, who started the Atomic Gardening Society to promote mutated varieties. Johnson describes a dinner party in which Howorth served “NC 4x,” North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed peanuts that were produced from seeds exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of X-rays. After the party, Howorth planted the irradiated seeds and they grew like magic beanstalks.
Journalists and sightseers came to visit the mutant plant; garden writer Beverley Nichols called the peanut the “most sensational plant in Britain.”
“To me it had all the romance of something from outer space. It is the first ‘atomic’ peanut. It is a lush, green plant and gives you a strange, almost alarming sense of thrusting power and lusty health. It holds a glittering promise in its green leaves, the promise of victory over famine,” she wrote, as recounted on .
As with modern biotechnology, industry was the main driver behind the new plant modifications. Two modern cultivars are the result of atomic gardening, Johnson says — most of the world's mint oil, used in toothpaste, chewing gum and more, comes from the “Todd's Mitcham” peppermint cultivar, which is resistant to a fungus. It was produced in radiation gardens at Brookhaven National Laboratory. And the “Rio Star” grapefruit varietal, which Johnson says accounts for three-fourths of grapefruit production in Texas, is another atomic mutant bred for its dark red flesh and juice.
Gamma garden research was conducted in the U.S., Sweden, and other countries in the 1960s, leading to untold numbers of new plant varieties. But s far as Johnson can tell, the entrepreneur Speas was the only source for home gardeners to buy irradiated seeds. Seed packets depicted robust flowers and vegetables, calling them “atomic-energized” and offering an interesting definition of what radiation does — “gamma rays tend to shake up the normal balanced system of the embryo inside the plant.”
Eventually, as scientists and the public grew to understand the dangers posed by radiation exposure, gamma gardens fell out of favor. The notion of irradiated plants feeding a hungry world soon wilted, too.
Decades later, scientists would figure out how to make much more precise mutations, and switching them on to make plants do things they couldn’t do before. But this method has its own detractors, some of whom would argue genetic modification is just as bad for health and the environment as radioactivity research.
We know much more about biology today than we did in the 1960s. But will future generations look back on genetic modification like we reflect on atomic gardens, with an amused sense of nostalgia illuminated by hindsight?
Vintage Cutaways Show the Nuclear Reactors of Our Past (and Present)
Wall-art-worthy cutaways of European, American, and Asian nuclear reactors
the photo gallery.
These reactors were built between around 1960 and 1980, typically, and they've gone through some pretty amazing stuff. Some of them are still in use today, one of them is responsible for the worst nuclear accident in its nation's history, and some of them were shut down in the ensuing decades. You can check out , if you're so inclined, or check out our gallery.
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This month's is brought to you by Digikey. All posts are purely editorial content, which we are pleased to present with the help of a sponsor; the sponsor has no input in the content itself.
High-Powered NASA Grow-Light Reduces Chemotherapy Side Effects
WARP 75 lamp eases pain
The technology is called High Emissivity Aluminiferous Luminescent Substrate, or “HEALS,” and in a clinical trial, it used the equivalent energy of a dozen suns to alleviate a condition called oral mucositis, essentially mouth and throat sores. Patients who take chemo drugs have a high incidence of mucositis, which can be so painful that they can’t eat solid foods.
HEALS was initially developed as a plant growth chamber for shuttle missions. It uses LEDs that emit long wavelengths of light, stimulating cells to grow (or to aid in healing). The LEDs emit plenty of photons, but no heat, according to NASA.
The study used a WARP 75 light-delivery system, which provides the equivalent light energy of 12 suns from each of 288 LED chips, each the size of a grain of salt. There’s no heat, just lots of energy.
In a two-year, double-blind trial, researchers tested the light therapy on 20 cancer patients at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, and 60 patients from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The patients all had bone marrow transplants or stem cell transplants. They were organized into groups at low and high risk of developing mucositis. At random, half of each risk group received HEALS treatment and half were treated with a placebo device that had no therapeutic effects.
Nurses held the devices close to patients’ left and right cheek and neck for 88 seconds each, every day for two weeks at the start of the bone marrow or stem cell transplant. Patients filled out a form to describe their levels of pain, and doctors and nurses checked their mouths for signs of mucositis.
Ultimately, they found the patients with real HEALS treatment experienced less pain, NASA said. There’s a 96 percent chance this was a direct result of the light therapy, according to the study.
Doctors say the treatment could offer several benefits, including better nutrition, less drug use and improved morale, which can all help patients improve faster.
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How To Genetically Modify a Seed, Step By Step
Using nature as a guide, geneticists build plants with qualities evolution could never produce
But then you notice the wispy strands of soybean seedlings curling to life, their root tendrils bunched into test tubes lightly packed with soil, and you remember — this place is all about seeds.
Monsanto Co. produces 90 percent of the world’s transgenic crops, using a complex marriage between ancient techniques — cross-breeding different plants to produce a desired trait — and the most modern technologies available, from genomic research to NASA-caliber mechanical engineering.
Originally a chemical company, Monsanto produced some of the world’s most controversial substances — saccharine, DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange — before evolving into the biotech giant it is today. That evolution has been marked by controversy, including lawsuits against farmers, allegations of unfair trade practices, and more. The company produces the herbicide Roundup, and also seeds whose genes have been engineered to survive Roundup's active plant-killing ingredient. Now the vast majority of this country’s possess those engineered genes.
For a closer look at the tools of the GE trade,
Behind every single seed is at least a decade of research involving geneticists, engineers and farmers, working to produce a seed that will grow exactly as expected, and in a way nature may not have intended. Here's how it’s done.
Step one: Finding a new trait
Ginny Ursin, head of technology prospecting at Monsanto, has been studying plants most of her life; at age 10, she cobbled together a makeshift greenhouse in the front yard. It was well-built enough that a city building inspector dropped by to inquire about a permit, she recalled. After obtaining her Ph.D in genetics from the University of California-Davis, she studied the biochemical pathways that allow plants to accumulate oil. She has spent more than a decade developing a new omega-3 soybean, which actually produces a precursor fatty acid that our bodies convert into a heart-healthy type of omega-3 — fish oil without the fish. Its history includes Alaskan wildflowers, a type of mold used in Indonesian cooking and years of patient cultivation.
To produce a genetically modified organism, you have to identify the trait you want the plant to have, and find out what other organisms already have it. This involves luck as much as careful searching — Monsanto first produced “Roundup Ready” glyphosate-tolerant plants using a gene from bacteria found growing near a Roundup factory. Ursin pored over science texts outlining organisms’ fatty acid compositions, tested hundreds of flowers and fungi, and finally narrowed down the web of life to two fatty-acid-producing enzymes found in primrose flower and a mold called neurospora.
Concocting a transgenic soybean seed also involves testing the plants themselves to find the most worthy subjects. Monsanto invented some cutting-edge technology to help its scientists make that step more efficient.
Step two: Grabbing genes
In the past, studying the genetic code of individual seeds required planting the seed, growing the plants to a certain size, and then clipping a paper-hole-puncher through a leaf to gather a sample. But that’s a time-consuming and resource-heavy process, so it’s easier to study the seeds themselves, explains Kevin Deppermann, head of Monsanto’s automation engineering department. This requires grinding them up, which is also inconvenient, because a ground-up seed can’t be planted. To get around this, Monsanto engineers invented a special chipping device that shaves off just a tiny piece of the seed and grinds it into a powder that can be analyzed with genome-mapping technology. Meanwhile, the viable remainder of the seed is preserved for planting and cultivation.
“Now we know what genes are in the seed before it’s in the ground,” Deppermann said.
Deppermann boasts that he recently hired away an engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and that he believes with the right tools, Monsanto will be able to meet its goal of tripling crop yields while reducing resource use by two-thirds by 2030. He says the chipper, which Monsanto patented last year, is one such tool. A blast of air separates the shavings from the rest of the seed; a bar code system ensures the two can be reconciled later. The device, about the size of a home air conditioner, can chip a seed every second. The chip is ground to a fine powder and analyzed with an automated high-throughput genotyping system, also developed in-house.
It was easy to design a chipper for soybeans, because the seeds are shaped such that they always fall a certain way. But corn kernels are all different, and you don’t want to shave off the wrong part and kill the embryo. Monsanto’s corn chipper uses cameras and object-recognition algorithms to determine how each seed should be aligned for proper chipping. Next-generation chippers for melons and other fruits have a camera that takes 100,000 frames per second — all to help geneticists find new traits even faster.
Step three: “Trait insertion”
Now that you’ve got your genes, the next step is inserting them into the plants. There are a couple ways to do this, including using “gene guns” that literally shoot pieces of DNA. A .22-caliber charge fires a metal particle coated with DNA into plant tissue. Monsanto no longer uses the technique, but it's still widely used among other biotech companies.
For omega-3 soybeans, Ursin and colleagues used a slightly more delicate process, heating soybean seedlings to place them under stress and make them susceptible to a bug called Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The organism specializes in invading plant DNA and tricking it into producing sugars and amino acids that feed the bacteria. Scientists can exploit this Trojan horse ability and insert new proteins into the plant’s chromosomes. The plant recognizes this foreign encoded protein as one of its own, Ursin said.
“This is now in all the plant progenitor cells. The pollen will have that DNA in its genome, so when you have a pollination event and create new seed, that trait is advanced into the next generation,” she said. And there you have it: a first-generation genetically modified plant.
It's also a game of chance — just like with breeding, you never know how the offspring will turn out. Ursin and colleagues produced large sets of modified seedlings to make sure the new genes ended up in the right spot on the genome, because if they don’t, the plant could suffer myriad side effects that would make it unsuitable for sale (at a premium price) to farmers. The next step: finding the best candidates.
Step four: The growth chamber gauntlet
After about two years of testing, Ursin narrowed down her soybean seedlings to a handful of potential winners, then further weeded them out to result in one special GM seed. Many legal hurdles lie ahead — Monsanto is — but company officials hope the soybeans will hit the market within two years.
Monsanto’s sprawling, campus-like headquarters has multiple cafeterias and a minivan fleet that shuttles workers among buildings simply named "A" to "Z"; it's here that Deppermann and his colleagues do their work. Down the road in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield is the purview of biologists like Ursin: 108 climate-controlled growth chambers, 26 greenhouses and 250 laboratories on a 1.5 million-square-foot campus, to which the company is currently making $65 million in upgrades.
Those chambers are home to countless thousands of seedlings being tested for drought tolerance, salt tolerance, pest and disease resistance, and more. Currently, plant biologists have to study their charges by hand, taking pictures of their roots and testing their viability. Deppermann would like that entire process to be automated, and along with new seed chippers, engineers in the automation lab are building just such a contraption.
Those wispy soybean seedlings quietly growing amid a cacophony of machine sounds? They’re test candidates for an automatic germination system, which sucks up individual seeds, plants them, blows dirt from their roots to check their health, and automatically supplies nutrients the plant needs to grow.
“We have to keep the thing alive along the way,” Deppermann said.
Step five: Planting
Automated technology is meant to make the geneticists’ work easier, but someone still has to plant the seeds, tend to the plants and bring them to harvest. That’s where Marcus Jones comes in. Jones, who’s built like an NFL linebacker, sports impressive dreads, and plays drums in an African-Cuban band, talks passionately about the “farmscape” and the importance of efficient, productive land use. He helped develop Monsanto’s GenV planter, a sort of souped-up, GPS-enabled tractor that can give a farmer ultra-precise sowing data.
Buy a bag of Monsanto seed, and you’ll get more than a bunch of genetically modified plant embryos — Monsanto provides detailed instructions about plant spacing, water and fertilizer use, plant population and more. Monsanto uses the planter to devise those recommendations. The machine knows its location in a field to within 9 inches and can work 24/7, sowing seeds under cover of night if necessary. It has five separate seed boxes and can distinguish among different hybrid varieties, and it will remember exactly what plant was sown where, ensuring accurate data for Monsanto’s agronomic experts. The planter can sow seeds at variable speeds and spacings, providing a well-rounded picture of how plants grow in certain conditions.
This summer, Jones and colleagues are working on a pilot study with John Deere to develop planting technology that also responds to the environment, recommending spacing, fertilizer and more depending on the conditions. The goal is to grow sturdier crops, and more of them, with less water, less space and less nutrients, Jones said.
“We’re not going to acquire any more land, but we can plant more per acre,” he said.
Step six: The genes express themselves
So now you've isolated new genes, chipped thousands of seeds to find strong candidates, grown the candidate plants in special chambers, and learned the ideal method to plant them in the ground. Now you have to prevent weeds from stealing their nutrients, and keep pests from harvesting the crops before you do. That's where Monsanto butters its bread: Genetically modified crops that can resist herbicides and pests.
Farmers who buy Monsanto’s transgenic seeds are free to spray Roundup on their fields throughout the growing season. The company says this reduces the need for tilling and thereby prevents soil erosion. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, kills growing plants by preventing them from forming three particular aromatic amino acids, tryptophan, phenylalanine, and tyrosine.
To create “Roundup Ready” plants, Monsanto cloned a gene from a form of agrobacterium found growing at a Roundup factory. Researchers found that this particular bug's amino production was not affected by glyphosate, and they used E. coli to clone the gene responsible for this trait. Then they used a different agrobacterium — the familiar A. tumefaciens — to stick the gene into the chromosomes of plants. The plants that have the bacteria's gene are still able to produce the three amino acids, and they survive just fine. Weeds are not so lucky.
Agrobacterium is not the only bacteria the company uses to make genetic modifications. "Bt" varieties of cotton and corn have been modified to produce a chemical that is toxic to insect larvae, and the gene that expresses that trait comes from a bug called Bacillus thuringiensis. (The gene is also inserted using the A. tumefaciens process.) Farmers need to plant “refuges,” areas without their engineered insect-tolerant seeds, so that pests still have a place to feast and will be less likely to evolve resistance. that Bt plant roots can leach Bt toxins into ground soil, however, and while Bt is a native bacteria, the plants' effects on the other soil flora is still relatively unknown. Bt cotton is widespread in China and India, the world’s two largest cotton producers.
Roundup Ready soybeans were brought to the market in 1996, followed by alfalfa, corn, cotton, spring canola, sugarbeets and winter canola. The crops caught on like wildfire; more than 90 percent of the nation’s soybeans and about 70 percent of its corn have Roundup Ready genes. But weeds have begun evolving to resist Roundup, too — at least 10 glyphosate-resistant broadleaf weed species were found living in 22 states as of last spring. This is why the company is working on soybeans and canola that are resistant to the herbicide dicamba as well as glyphosate — that way, farmers can use both.
“Dicamba is an effective herbicide on broadleaf weeds, and that’s where a number of the challenges have come up in the last few years,” said Steve Padgette, Monsanto’s vice president of biotechnology. He said it’s already approved for pre-emergent use in soybeans, meaning farmers can spray it before the crops sprout; Monsanto wants it approved for post-emergent spraying, like Roundup is now.
Meanwhile, opponents argue Bt and Roundup Ready crops’ environmental effects have not been sufficiently studied. Among myriad concerns and accusations: GM opponents point to studies that claim a strain of Roundup Ready corn was toxic to the kidneys and liver of lab rats (Monsanto says that study was flawed); that crops engineered to produce higher yields actually do the opposite; that Bt corn is toxic to monarch caterpillars; that GM crops encourage farmers to spray chemicals with abandon, harming the environment (proponents point to studies saying the opposite, that the transgenic crops reduce pesticide and herbicide use) and so on.
In December, a lawsuit involving Roundup Ready alfalfa reached a key step that could allow the crop to be planted once again this spring. The alfalfa was approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2005, and the following year, consumer and environmental groups filed suit under the National Environmental Policy Act. The Center for Food Safety sued won an injunction against the sale and planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa until the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) could complete an environmental review. The U.S. Supreme Court while the study was being completed; now it's done, and farmers will likely be planting the crop this spring.
Plenty of other cases are ping-ponging through the courts — last fall, a California judge ordered the , but that ruling was later reversed, allowing the crops to stay in the ground for now.
Future steps: Using nature as a guide to feed the world
Beyond broad-spectrum herbicide resistance, the future of transgenic seeds lies in loftier (and more difficult) goals like increased crop yields, drought tolerance, improved nitrogen uptake and even value-added traits to make mass-produced food more nutritious. Monsanto is working with the African Agricultural Technology Foundation to license the technology it used to make drought-tolerant corn, which it hopes will debut in this country by 2012. Corn is a huge cash crop in this country, so Monsanto isn’t exactly giving it away — but the public-private partnership, financed in part by a $47 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, will help African companies develop their own strains, which theoretically can thrive in dry areas of western Africa.
Ursin is no longer in the lab, now prospecting for other biotech companies Monsanto might like to partner with or buy someday. But she said she looks forward to standing in a field full of omega-3 soybeans next year, which for her will be a dream come true.
“It’s one thing to have a garden in your yard, and get tomatoes and basil all summer, but it’s another thing to talk about feeding 9 billion people (by 2050). For every plant breeder, everyone involved in producing food, there are some really big challenges,” she said. “(Biotech) is not the only thing ... I know people have their issues with this technology. But it’s a tremendous technology. It’s using nature as a guide.”
Monsanto is far from the only biotech company marching down this path. Archrival DuPont, which produces transgenic seeds under its Pioneer brand, and Swiss firm Syngenta are also working toward value-added crops. Syngenta is producing golden rice with higher concentrations of vitamin A, for instance. Studies have shown the added trait could combat vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. And DuPont is making its own soybeans capable of producing healthier oils. DuPont’s high-oleic soybean reduces trans fats by eliminating the need for hydrogenation, and it won FDA deregulation in June, meaning it could be in the food supply by 2012. Monsanto executives hope their omega-3 soybeans will be available worldwide by 2012, too.
Though it has met with resistance — especially in Europe and, to a growing extent, in countries like India and China — this new wave of value-added traits is the next step for genetic engineering. For one thing, modifying food to provide better nutrition and greater yield seems much more honorable than simply selling more herbicide. And as patents expire, seed companies will seek to profit from characteristics that could help farmers market their wares to health-conscious consumers.
While social, economic and political changes are doubtless more important to ensuring a healthy food supply for the world’s poor, experts from a wide range of ideologies say driven by biotechnology is increasingly necessary, too. Even , saying developed nations have a moral responsibility to guarantee food security. Vatican science advisers released a 14-page document last fall that said GM crops are no more dangerous than natural evolution, and that opponents in developed countries are unjustified in opposing them.
Such policy debates will continue, but transgenic crops, like those frail little soybeans struggling forth in the Monsanto machine shop, are very likely the food of the future.
Genetically Engineered Plants Grow Ingredients For Making Green Plastic
The plants’ seeds contain a type of fatty acid that could be used as a chemical building block for common plastics, the researchers say.
Most plastic still comes from petroleum or coal, although plant-derived are becoming more common. Many containers are now made of polylactic acid, a polyester derived from corn starch or sugar cane byproducts, for instance. But growing plastic precursor compounds inside plants could be even better — there would be no need to tap into the food supply to make to-go cups.
Plant biologists wanted to make plants that produce unusually high levels of omega-7 fatty acids, which can be used to make compounds needed in plastic production. They experimented with genes from plants that are known to produce those acids in their seeds, including milkweed and a plant called cat’s claw vine. They worked with , the most common laboratory plant, and started inserting some genes.
Ultimately, the researchers had to engineer an entirely new metabolic pathway, creating artificial enzymes and interfering with gene expression to come up with an Arabidopsis plant whose seeds contain high levels of omega-7 fatty acids.
The engineered plant seed oil could be used as a renewable source of chemicals needed to make plastics such as polyethylene, according to Brookhaven biochemist John Shanklin, who led the research.
More research and plant oil extraction technology is needed, of course. But the research, reported online in the journal Plant Physiology, proves that it’s possible to make industrially relevant quantities of the materials. It’s only a matter of time before Arabidopsis fatty acid cups show up at your neighborhood coffee shop.
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