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.
> We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize
I mean the article states the tobacco photosyntesized twice as effectively, with RsRubisco, which is actually less efficient the GmRubisco. So food-wise it seems hypothetically achievable.
I agree we'd need massive conscious degrowth in every other part of the economy though.
This goes back to my theory that the people most freaked out about climate change are the ones with kids, who are mad that other less responsible people have more kids, while I'm just chilling here with no kids at all and clearly see that if all those assholes stopped having kids, climate change would be solved within 20 years.
Go Vegan! It’s easier than you think, especially since you live in a city. No judgements from me if you can’t/choose not to, it does take work. Just a bit of encouragement, and a thank you for making the compassionate and ecologically sound choice.
UN projections, which are on the "business as usual" side of things.
Plenty of events, like the pandemic, which put immense downward pressure on fertility.
Also, the African continent is a net food importer. This could be turned around - particularly by Nigeria, which has the natural resources to produce fertiliser, but so far the observed effect has been a surge (+65%) of imports.
With the situation in Ukraine being what it is, I don't think this is sustainable.
Niger is currently experiencing a population explosion, which will force it to implement the same policies as Kenya to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe.
I fear that a 'decent world war' nowadays may include nukes, so damage to the environment will be great.
As an example, the dam that was destroyed in Ukraine and flooded a 'small area' (considering the planet-scale)(https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kakhova-dam-ukraine-russia-1.6...).
Which (your post and my thinking of a response) reminded me of the series: Aftermath - Population Zero (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1264068/); I remember watching some series back in the day.. I think it's time to watch this again.
I'm slowly starting to realise that nukes are very unlikely to be involved simply because the selfish shits who start and run the wars know they personally won't survive if they start the nuke match.
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.
The claim was this technology would increase carrying capacity. That implies growing more food, not growing the same amount of food on less land.
I agree, as far as being able to use less land for agriculture, this could be a beneficial development. Only problem is that's not how humans typically work.
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.
Yep, it's easy to grow in quantity. It has a relatively large/complete plant genome and, I think tobacco mosaic virus was used to implant genes early on. Another plant often used is corn since as I remember it allows plasmids to be implanted for new proteins (and you can add more plasmids to increase production).
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.
Sorry if I was unclear in my statement. I assumed, without access to the article, that this release is using "Tobacco" loosely to mean "some sort of Nicotiana", likely Nicotiana Benthamiana. Calling N. Benthi "Tobacco" is something I've seen in other press releases and popular descriptions of plant research.
Definitely not trying to suggest it's the only model plant! Like you said, Arabidopsis is huge, and there are other plants used commonly as well. Just pointing out that using N. Benthi / "Tobacco" in research is def not uncommon for some kinds of plant research. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18616398/
All that said, I'm not a plant biologist! I'm just an engineer who happened to work for a bit of time in Biotech, and is trying to continue learning about that field on the side, so feel to take my thoughts on this with a grain of salt or 2!
Benthy, maize, and arabidopsis are the three major plant models. Hundreds of labs specialize in benthy, thousands more use it. It is absolutely a model by any conceivable definition of the term.
One of the primary reasons it is a model is due to transient expression in the leaves via TMV. You can quickly assay many constructs on the same plant with a simple overnight experiment.
Tobacco is a model organism because TMV is so easy to work with. You can grow tobacco to maturity quicky, transfect it with TMV, isolate the TMV and then transfect another generation extremely rapidly, with low effort, and you don't even need PPE really.
It's so easy to work with that chemists (who often suck at biology) use it as a model for supramolecular chemistry.
> 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.
It is beautiful and a solid favourite here in the UK.
I never did try to smoke a garden grown nicotiana. Thinking back on it, I probably should have grown my own and really got to grips with it. When I gave up fags, they costed around £10.50 for a packet of 20 Lambert and Butler. Nowadays £11.95 (1)
No pressure, but I do recommend not having to gasp for breath when you walk up a hill. It is a bit of a pain. To be fair, I'm not in the best of shape but my lungs are not what they were.
I wonder if you're getting downvotes because people think you're serious. Everyone who prides themselves on not smoking loves a chance to get a little classist dig at those who do.
Smokes ain't expensive because of the cost of tobacco, though. They're expensive because, like most vices, the demand is highly inelastic and governments can tax the hell out of them without pissing off anyone who matters (once the gentry and the middle class have been conditioned not to smoke - prior to that, they were handed out as rations).
I love smoking, and ideally all those taxes I pay would be going toward cancer research and health care subsidies, but in reality they just go to the budgets of nonprofits and a class of people whose job is to further ostracize anyone who enjoys tobacco.
Those taxes you pay are entirely about encouraging you and everyone else to smoke less, and it's one of a few interventions that supported by evidence.
The government has been intentionally making tobacco expensive for a generation or more.
They regulated all the supplies to grow tobacco, making it all but impossible to profitably grow in the US. Then they added a bunch of tariffs on both supply and tobacco. Then they tax the hell out of the final product.
Cigarettes are super cheap without government interference
The tariffs on French and Spanish imports really sucked. The day Gauloises and Gitanes disappeared from the US was dark. I would pay $50 a pouch for that stuff if I could obtain it anywhere. I never come back from Europe without the maximum I'm allowed to bring in.
The US does have fairly steep tariffs on imported sugar. And subsidises domestic corn production. Hence why high-fructose corn syrup is found in nearly everything!
