Is agriculture discussion allowed on this board? Or is that not a science

Yeah nothing wrong with GMOs. By making the majority of world crops genetically identical we are helping plagues become more effective.

>because I want to help feed starving people...

Daft. Has your sort learned nothing from the Green Revolution? Hunger is a socioeconomic and perhaps political problem. As you continue improving yields populations will continue booming to consume them. The only thing that will have achieved in terms of hunger is increasing the absolute number of starving people.

The goal of agricultural research is profit and the advancement of technical civilisation. It can not and will not solve starvation.

t. bioinformatician in plant breeding

>making the majority of world crops genetically identical
That doesn't have to be the case with GMOs. As long as you have a good marker for the desired gene(s), you can still introduce a good degree of diversity into a GMO population through hybridization and selective breeding.

>you can introduce a good degree of diversity

>you can
But GMO companies dont. They just select whatever improves crop yield and that means a predetermined set of genes. These can have other vital physiological functions that are made linear and therefore easier to face erradication.

>good degree of diversity
Not as much as a non edited crop. No matter how you try to justify this, you still lose out to organic agriculture on this matter.

it might not solve world hunger but actually having more food definitely helps

Helps whom?

Again, all else being equal increasing the food supply will increase the number of starving people.

More food=cheaper food. Easier for poorer country's to buy and stuff like that

Dude don't comment when you clearly don't know shit. There are hundreds of different varieties of each gmo crop. I guess you'd take mass malnutrition over a made up plague

Malthusianist get out reeeeeeeee

>There are hundreds of different varieties of each gmo crop
Source

>I guess you'd take mass malnutrition over a made up plague

>implying 1 in 9 people arent suffering from chronic undernourishment already
>implying locust plagues arent a recurring issue since biblical times

You dont fix a problem with another problem. The solution is to reduce our numbers, not try to feed beyond our capabilities.

Lmfao you have no idea what you're talking about.

You know what one of the biggest goals in industry biotech right now is? Disease resistance trait stacking. Many of the cultivars for major crops that are naturally disease resistant aren't good crop plants (poor yield, wrong climate, etc), but the cultivars that are good crop plants lack those disease resistance genes.

So what biotech companies are doing is finding all the genes responsible for disease resistance in all the wild varieties of the crop and its close relatives and stacking them in the crop of interest. I'm talking ten to fifteen genes all taken from close relatives or wild varieties, all conferring increased disease resistance.

BT corn? Glyphosate resistance? Those are ancient ideas from before we even had the means to modify plants. Sometimes we get new ideas like the antifreeze proteins, but the vast majority of modifications being made now are what I described above - you find all the factors that confer increased traits like disease resistance or stress tolerance and you stack them as high as you can, specifically to prevent the "one fungus takes out all our monocrops" scenario

You are the one who doesnt understand what you are talking about.
By concentrating all the favourable genes in a single organism, you are reducing the species pool in a single genome. If by some reason this genome is specially susceptible to some biotic or abiotic factor, and that factor comes into play, you are possibly condemning a species to extintion.
Microbial evolution is a very fast working one, reason why so many antibiotics have been made obsolete. GMOs can face the same scenario, brainlet.

>If by some reason this genome is specially susceptible to some biotic or abiotic factor, and that factor comes into play, you are possibly condemning a species to extintion.
If that factor existed, then no variety of the species would be resistant to it.

And, >condemning a species to extinction
Did you miss the part where I said these are coming from extant varieties?

>reason why so many antibiotics have been made obsolete
Antibiotics become useless because we over-prescribe a single drug. The probability of a bacteria becoming resistant to multiple drugs simultaneously is orders of magnitude lower than the probability of becoming resistant to a single drug. Stacking resistance traits is the only serious way to fight evolution of resistance, and it's exactly the strategy that is used in medicine against resistant bacteria.

This.
There's a special irony in that the people who we see screaming loudest about big money and industry corrupting and deluding people are also by far and away the most strongly influenced, in fact, by these tactics. It's very similar to the techniques of narcissists and sociopaths.
The organic ag industry is such a consistent and effective force against consumer information in largely owing to grassroots tactics combined with masterful appeal to cognitive bias and irrational/emotional thinking.

Anyway, here's the classic: geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/08/with-2000-global-studies-confirming-safety-gm-foods-among-most-analyzed-subject-in-science/
The review is linked at the bottom, and here: geneticliteracyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Nicolia-20131.pdf
GENERA: genera.biofortified.org/wp/
Sci-Hub: scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link/

Totally out of my field but if it works, that's great.
A question about that is mechanism and specificity as well as dose. One problem I have with organic pesticides is that dose is often unknown, but hey it must be safe it's natural...
The specificity of changing a rook microbiome is becoming an interesting topic.
Also I have not seen a follow up to the paper that your news article is sourced from became, which is too bad.
This method thought usually with soil bacteria is a method of antibiotic discovery.
Not sure if I really answered your question, but I don't have the evidence to really inform my decision.

one way to address this problem is by giving away seed that can be grown in nutrient poor soil, pest resistant, etc
I'm not going to pretend to address the socioeconomic issue, which is important, but I can apply my skills to try to make the world a little less malnourished.

>Not as much as a non edited crop. No matter how you try to justify this, you still lose out to organic agriculture on this matter.
hahhahahahahaha
oh yeah, organic farms totally don't use hybrid seeds of some mono culture.

This may be the case for small scale farms, but not so much for Big Ag/Organic.

Totally a different issue. This is why we introduce the GE gene or to different cultivars.

GMO's + crony capitalism = bad

literally everything that is famed is genetically modified

>this idiot

>one way to address this problem is by giving away seed that can be grown in nutrient poor soil, pest resistant, etc

Shame the thrust of funding and (consequently) research is in further centralisation of agriculture and increasing the dependence of farmers on large companies.

>but I can apply my skills to try to make the world a little less malnourished.

Again, this is misguided feel-good idiocy. Feel free to be proud of contributing to the advancement of civilization, expansion of scientific knowledge, or increasing corporate profits.

But to pretend you are contributing to solving the problem of hunger is a blatant falsehood. If anything, you are exacerbating it, just like the Green Revolution did.

GMO are just plant that have their ADN modified to be more productive, or to be more protected against pesticids, UV, insects...The goal of GMO is not to poison us. But playing with ADN is like modifying an ecosystem : if you change one gene, you're absolutely not sure that everything won't go wrong in the entire organism. This is the risk : if you modify the adn of tomatoes to make them produce blue colorant to eat blue tomatoes, the tomatoes could also produce a poison with slow effect. Even if you did'nt ask it.

Please provide an interested student with resources on the field, a general pointer towards the goods.

>you're absolutely not sure that everything won't go wrong in the entire organism
this is true as a general principle, but in practice the same biology that lets us modify the genomes of plants also lets us make astoundingly good predictions about what the effects of those modifications will be

yes, absolutely do test the resulting organism for toxicity. i don't mean to say "just throw GM crops on the market willy nilly". what i want isn't reduced testing and scrutiny for lab-modified organisms, but INCREASED testing across the board for crops produced by traditional breeding.

if i went on, say, naturalnews and said monsanto was selling a crop that contained a protein that an enormous portion of the populace had a severely life threatening reaction to, the comments section would be an absolute war and it would go viral in ten minutes all across facebook. now, if I did the same thing and changed the name from monsanto to, say, the name of a popular supplier of organic seeds to small farms, and mentioned that the name of that crop was peanuts, the reaction would be a resounding "well... duh".

the scrutiny on traditionally bred crops is orders of magnitude lower than on modern lab-modified crops, and yet the number of documented cases of physical injury and death from traditionally bred crops is orders of magnitude higher.

it's inconsistent policy.

Here's a good video explaining lots of the benefits of GMOs. There are some downsides not prevented here, but they're outweighed by all the benefits. People are just confused by people who are using GMOS wrong.

youtu.be/wZ2TF8-PGQ4

Every living thing on our planet is genetically modified.

1000s of years of artificial selection...
Genetic modification is a spectrum
Selection, inducing mutation, introducing transgenes are all modifying the genetics of an organism. Only the last one is considered non organic...

>Shame the thrust of funding and (consequently) research is in further centralisation of agriculture and increasing the dependence of farmers on large companies.

not necessarily, the BT eggplant was given away free and farmers can reuse seed since it's not a hybrid. But yeah, I wish there were a bigger push for academic production of crops.
> If anything, you are exacerbating it, just like the Green Revolution did.
interesting point have some papers I could look at? I am genuinely curious, the economics and distribution are not my strong point.
This is why we have safety regulations
pretty much this, the whole playing God just doesn't sit well with everyone and seems unnatural, but generally science prevails

Not sure what you mean by the goods or your sentence in general, but
The Cornell Alliance for Science and GMO Answers tend to have pretty good resources on ag science
Talking Biotech podcast is done by an excellent Sci Com professor
If you really like plant biology in general, then go to a local botanical garden and grow your own plants (best tasting). Major in plant bio, food isn't going out of style anytime soon. If you are in college then go to a good Ag/plant school for a PhD (Research triangle, Cornell, MSU, Davis, with Amherst and Madison being good as well)

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