Engineering an improved rubisco into the food supply (or the notional biological carbon capture stream) would significantly boost to the carrying capacity of our planet.
That's impossible. We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize. We've just taken too much too quickly. In the oceans for example there's population collapse of entire genera in different locations every single year and entire dexoygenated dead areas in the photic zone because of overfishing and damage caused by commercial fleets. According to the IUCN Red List there have been at least ten extinctions every year for the past thirty years. It doesn't help that there's a rivalry going on between which country can post the highest numbers for a mostly meaningless metric in GDP, causing deforestation for livestock, overfishing for export, monocultures spreading dozens of miles for crops that have a fifty percent chance of being burned to preserve prices, and so much mining entire mountain ranges disappear.
The trouble is you need a ton of water and fertilizer to support that growth, and drought combined with soil quality degradation is already a huge problem in a lot of regions, and will only become moreso as the globe warms and, p.s., fertilizer production is heavily dependent on petrochemicals and contributes to CO2 emissions.
It could be a huge development, no doubt, but there are many bottlenecks in agricultural production, so we need to be careful not to oversell this as some kind of panacea.
plant growth is not doubled yet, but this is still really neat.
“We’re not at the point where we’re outperforming wild-type tobacco, but we’re on the right trajectory,” Gunn said. “We only need fairly modest improvements to Rubisco performance, because even a very small increase over a whole growing season can lead to massive changes in plant growth and yield, and the potential applications span many sectors: higher agricultural production; more efficient and affordable biofuel production; carbon sequestration approaches; and artificial energy possibilities.”
Tobacco is one of a handful of plant "model organisms", basically meaning that we have a lot of studies already done and genetic / metabolic information about it available.
Scientists like using these when doing basic research of, e.g. gene function, because that wealth of prior information available reduces the amount of "unknown unknowns" to account for.
Tobacco isn't a model organism at all. Solacea genomes only really got sorted in the late 2010s. Its worth pointing out if you could do something in Tobacco you could have done it in Tomato or Potato, you know those crops that dont kill people globally but sustain them. Arabidopsis thaliana (a type of cress) is the small plant model organism, not because it's biologically significant, but because it had a tiny diploid genome that could be mapped early and it's easy to grow quickly in a lab and seeds fast.
> Tobacco is the easiest land plant in which to manipulate Rubisco and so serves as the test case for developing a more efficient Rubisco that can be transferred to more agronomically relevant species, Gunn said.
"Tobacco is the easiest land plant in which to manipulate Rubisco and so serves as the test case for developing a more efficient Rubisco that can be transferred to more agronomically relevant species, Gunn said."
FWIW it's a beautiful plant. I grow it every year just for the flowers, which have an amazing scent. A humid evening after a rain, the garden at night with the flower scent. Quite lovely.
I've tried curing and smoking the leaves, but without the right facilities it doesn't go too well and doesn't produce anything close to the quality of store bought pipe tobacco.
Readit News
It could be a huge development, no doubt, but there are many bottlenecks in agricultural production, so we need to be careful not to oversell this as some kind of panacea.
I know which I'd rather see escape into the wild again. Methed up sharks all over the shorelines or stoned ones? The choice is easy.
Of course if we can get them to make a stable LSD then the sharks and the squids will be coming ashore to do song and dance routines for us.
Man this one is gonna be hard to advertise
“We’re not at the point where we’re outperforming wild-type tobacco, but we’re on the right trajectory,” Gunn said. “We only need fairly modest improvements to Rubisco performance, because even a very small increase over a whole growing season can lead to massive changes in plant growth and yield, and the potential applications span many sectors: higher agricultural production; more efficient and affordable biofuel production; carbon sequestration approaches; and artificial energy possibilities.”
https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Tomacco
Scientists like using these when doing basic research of, e.g. gene function, because that wealth of prior information available reduces the amount of "unknown unknowns" to account for.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_organism
> Tobacco is the easiest land plant in which to manipulate Rubisco and so serves as the test case for developing a more efficient Rubisco that can be transferred to more agronomically relevant species, Gunn said.
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"Tobacco is the easiest land plant in which to manipulate Rubisco and so serves as the test case for developing a more efficient Rubisco that can be transferred to more agronomically relevant species, Gunn said."
Call it Nicotiana instead!
I've tried curing and smoking the leaves, but without the right facilities it doesn't go too well and doesn't produce anything close to the quality of store bought pipe tobacco.
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