Honestly, and while fighting off the blahs of too many rich foods and leftovers, your tracker looked around for something newsy this morning, beyond a rather good NYTimes ScienceTimes.
Hope grew on seeing that, a week ago, Monsanto got permission from the US Dept. of Agriculture’s Animal and Planet Health Inspection Service to plant corn modified for better drought tolerance. Here’s a small Reuters item by Charles Abbott. That’s interesting, one thought, a transgenic crop with a trait other than built-in BT pesticide, or tolerance for herbicide. Which is to say, a socially useful trait that may increase yields without, in the process, making farmers even more dependent on agrobusiness chemicals and other products. Perhaps, one thought, somebody might make note of this hint of the substantial benefits once promised for agriculture in the age of recombinant DNA.
Nothing substantial yet, however. I’ll keep eyes open for something along those lines. A specialty outlet called Agri-Pulse did look a bit further, mentioning other modified crops Monsanto is working on. One is a soybean with an unnatural ability to include an extra, medicinal fatty acid, and another is for a soybean that has – same old same old – a tolerance for certain herbicides called fops.
*UPDATE: We rec’d from the following author, thank you very much, a link toward more news info on Monsanto’s and its competitors’ corn and drought strategies, and reasons regulators are paying attention.
- Scientific American (May 13, 2011) David Biello : Coming to a Cornfield Near You: Genetically Induced Drought-Resistance ;
Emboldened, your tracker looked further afield for genetic modification news. And found a whiff of a science news mega-twofer, a GM dinosaur story.
It is at LiveScience from Stephanie Pappas: Dino-Chicken: Wacky but Serious Science Idea of 2011. It updates news about Jack Horner and his gang of paleontological science wits and their continuing work on a scheme – much reported over the last two years or so – to reset the skeletal genomes of standard chickens back to ancestral levels by more than 100 million years. The result could be an outward echo of their theropod ancestors. Forelimbs instead of wings, long tail rather than a feathered stub, and maybe throw in a few teeth.
Chickens are the starting points, as their genes are well-charted, but one can imagine that if the key changes in gene promoters and alleles were found in chickens – bear with me as we all suspend disbelief together – a natural and vaguely wicked next step would be to try it in something serious, as in an ostrich or emu. Then we’d have a STORY – a beasty that could really turn the tables on the next fox to wander into Horner’s chicken coop, and if let loose from his hometown of Bozeman might got folks up there to forget all about their supposed wolf problem.
Pappas dates this story today, the 27th, so presumably the Q&A she has with Horner was done recently. Or perhaps this is a re-tread. Glad it came along. We all need something light this time of year. Horner tells her that a lot of the basic reversions have been witnessed in lab animals, so putting them together is not hard to imagine. He makes a nice point. That if one revives a dinosaur from one of today’s dino-avians, which is to say revives primitive, ancestral characteristics, that implies chickens do have ancestry going back to such creatures. Evolution QED, you pesky creationists!
Horner actually comes off sounding rather sensible about this project. No Emu-born velociraptor II for him, or a T. Rex Redux. He says, “Sixth graders would do that, but’d I’d just as soon make something that wouldn’t eat me.” As for the chicken project, he says, they’ll still think they’re chickens.
UPDATE 2 : Turns out this hit on chicken-o-saurus, during a search for GM stories, merely landed me on an entry in LiveScience’s year-ending lists of stories, category Wacky Animal Stories. It is now included in a subsequent tracker post on such lists. Unclear is whether this ran earlier this year too, or has been done expressly for the end-of-year salutes.
– Charlie Petit
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