Researchers have successfully transferred a gene to produce tobacco plants that lack pollen and viable seeds, while otherwise growing normally
Tweaks to the mitochondrial genome hold the potential for better hybrid seed production or to introduce seedless fruits.
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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.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate? It's interesting but I still don't understand why it's useful.
I'd love to see a seedless watermelon. It'd be less of a hassle to eat them.
Plus no risk of the seed germinating and growing in your stomach.
Embrace the watermelon seed, and become one with Big Watermelon.
Seedless watermelon tases like nothing. I'd love to see seeded watermelon again.
So you've got seedless grapes, but say this one flavor of grapes you really like is seeded. Boom! Now you can make it seedless. We've got seedless oranges, but say you really like the taste of Valencia oranges (which are seeded). Boom! Now you've got seedless Valencias. And you go from there.
So tobacco seeds are annoying for people who smoke?
Nah, much like shit gets tested on mice, tobacco is the goto for testing on plants.
Yeah, there's time we need to test on pigs and whatnot. But mice are usually good enough in multiple domains, cheap to get a lot, and are pretty easy to handle in a lab. So that's the usual selection for testing shit on.
Pretty much same deal with tobacco, checks enough boxes for interesting things to test against, is super cheap, and pretty straightforward for dealing with in a lab.
You do initial testing on dummy cheap shit. Once you work out the bugs on the cheap thing, pretty much you do roughly the same thing on the expensive stuff that you're actually going to sell.
Tobacco is super cheap and editing the seed gene on it is pretty similar to the seed gene in grapes. So you do most of the work on cheap ass tobacco. When you've got tobacco down switching that same process over to grape only requires a few tweaks.