November « 2009 « James and the Giant Corn

November 12, 2009

Hawaiian Pineapples and the Seed Industry

Filed under: agriculture,Fun With Numbers — Tags: corn, hawaii, papaya, pineapple — James @ 2:37 pm

Pineapple. Wish I'd thought to check for a country of origin...

Since today seems to have a tropical theme, here’s another post about Hawaii:

The corn breeding industry is expanding in Hawaii*. The pineapple industry is contracting. People seem to be blaming the second on the first, and are passing this article around. My reading of the article, and some other statistics I looked, don’t seem to agree with the story line (evil GMO seed companies driving out the pineapple industry) that people seem to be suggesting.

Yes, Monsanto did buy out one of Hawaii’s three remaining large pineapple growers several years ago (as of 2007 there were also 49 small pineapple producers growing pineapples on 1-15 acres and a single medium sized grower with between 100-250 acres), but Maui Land & Pineapple Co., the company this article talks about, isn’t selling out to a seed company, they’re switching to the production of other crops instead of pineapples. One company sells its land and shuts down, another stays in the farming business but gives up on pineapples and announced plans to grow a more diverse range of crops. To me, that suggests it is becoming harder and harder to make a profit growing pineapples in Hawaii. (more…)

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Genetically Engineered Crops: Papaya

Filed under: agriculture,Crop Profiles,Feeding the world,Plants — Tags: fruit, genetic engineering, hawaii, papaya, thailand, virus — James @ 2:04 am

Photo Reeding, Flickr (Click for photo stream)

Scientific Name: Carica papaya

Genetically Engineered Trait: Resistance to the papaya ringspot virus

Details of Genetic Engineering:

In the 1990s papaya ringspot virus was in the process of wiping out the Hawaiian papaya industry, then the second largest fruit industry in Hawaii. Conventional approaches such as selective breeding for resistant papayas or attempting to grow trees in isolation had failed. The virus is transmitted by small sap-sucking insects such as aphids. Infected papaya trees can be recognized by the discolored rings on their fruit (that the virus gets its name from) yellow leaves, and most importantly from a papaya farmer’s perpsective a 60-100%* loss of fruit production. (more…)

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November 11, 2009

bt: The Bacteria and the Protein

Filed under: agriculture — Tags: bacillus, bt, cry, genetic engineering, insect, pests — James @ 9:02 pm

I figured if I am going to do a review of genetically engineered crops, I needed to address the other major traits besides resistance to herbicides presently on the market. This one addresses a family of proteins found in the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis that can kill insects.

Anyone who reads about the public policy debates swirreling around genetically engineered crops will be familar with the two letter abbreviation ‘bt’ as in bt corn, bt cotton, bt ginseng (the last is fictional). What always surprises me is that some people STOP reading before they come across an explanation of what bt stands for. Just typing bt into google won’t bring up a relevant result until the 30th hit (two letters just isn’t very unique). I have talked with people who are convinced bt stands for everything from biologically treated to BioToxin. It doesn’t.

Golden Eyed Lacewing Adult. It's not much use, but the larva vicious predators of certain plant pests. (Photo public domain courtesy of USDA. You guys are awesome!)

The name actually comes from a species of bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis. Different substrains of the species carry different members of a family of genes that code for Cry proteins (and separately can also carry genes that code for Cyt proteins*), which can kill insects. Finding chemical or biological means to kill insects isn’t that hard. What makes the Cry proteins noteworthy is how selective they are in their killing. A given Cry protein is dangerous to only a small subset of insect species. And that’s important, because, for every** western corn rootworm, european corn borer, or earworm there are also benign or even beneficial insects in and around fields like lacewings, trichogramma wasps, or those rootworm eating nematodes I talked about a couple of days ago, which aren’t insects, but also harmed by insecticides. (Agro-ecology is beyond my field of expertise, had to call up my tipster from the previous post to get this list) When a crop is genetically engineered to produce one of the dozens of Cry proteins discovered in Bacillus thuringiensis, it replaces or reduces the spraying of insecticides to control insect pests, with positive effects on insect biodiversity. (more…)

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Spam Wave

Filed under: Site Business — Tags: spam — James @ 2:53 am

I’m getting hit by completely nonsensical spam comments (nothing that looks like words in any language, no working links) at a rate of close to one per minute. As a result I’ve had to reactivate my spam filter, the same one that was misbehaving earlier. If you’re comments aren’t showing up, drop an e-mail to jcs##@jamesandthegiantcorn.com (replacing the ## with the sum of 23 and 75).

Please let me know if you have any idea what might be causing this upswing.

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Genetically Engineered Crop: Blue Carnations

Filed under: Crop Profiles,Genetics,Plants — Tags: anthocyanins, blue rose, carnation, florigen, flowers — James @ 2:08 am

Florigene's Moondust carnations, one of several violet and blue varieties they've created with genetic engineering. Photo by Pagemoral and licensed under the creative commons. Click to see the photo in its original context with license information

Scientific Name: Dianthus caryophyllus

Genetically Engineered Trait: Anthocyanin biosynthesis (blue and violet plant pigments)

Details of Genetic Engineering:

The market in flowers with genetically engineered colors is (to my knowledge) occupied by a single Australian company called Florigene. They study anthocyanins, the class of plant pigments responsible for, among other things, the coloration of purple potatoes, purple carrots, black rice, purple corn, and many blue and purple berries. Anthocyanins are one of the key classes of plant pigments, found to greater or lesser extent in most flowering plants.* Florigene has been producing purple and sometimes blue carnations since the 1990s by adding key enzymes in the anthocyanin pathway from other plant species. While purple carnations are cool, the real goal of Florigene’s work has been blue (and purple, and violet) roses, something rose breeders have been trying and failing to create for centuries.

Florigene was granted a license to grow their first breed of genetically engineered blue rose this summer, (although as far as I can tell the roses aren’t yet for sale, so they don’t get their own post). For more on plant pigments, Florigene, and why the development of blue roses as foiled breeders for so long, check out this fascinating post by MAT Kinase.

Purple potatoes with orange carrots (and did you know most carrots where white when they were first domesticated?)

Purple potatoes with orange carrots (and did you know most carrots were white when they were first domesticated?)

About Carnations:

Carnations belong to the caryophyllales, an extended family of plants that include cacti (cool), rhubarb (tasty), and carnivorous plants like sundews and venus fly traps(awesome!). Beyond that, I’ll admit I don’t know much about their biology.

If you know someone who is into flower meanings (I used to date a girl who was), you’ll notice there is no definition on record for blue carnations. It makes them the perfect gift to say, “I like you, so I bought you flowers” without having to worry about any unintentional subtext beside: “I’m also a huge plant/genetics geek, and if you don’t ask me soon how they make the flowers blue I’m going to burst!”

*The extent of anthocyanin biosynthesis in flowering plants is a good indicator that the ancestor of all the flowering plants alive today (which lived sometime between 250 and 100 million years ago) already contained the genes needed to produce anthocyanins, and flowering plants which are unable to produce them today, like roses, cannot because their ancestors lost the ability.

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November 10, 2009

Genetically Engineered Crops: Soybean

Filed under: agriculture,Crop Profiles,Plants — Tags: herbicide resistance, liberty link, nitrogen fixation, peanuts, roundup ready, soybeans — James @ 2:00 am

Soybean field. Photo: Big Grey Mare, Flickr (click photo to view photostream)

Scientific Name: Glycine max

Genetically Engineered Traits: Herbicide Resistance

Details of Genetic Engineering:

The genetic engineering of soybeans is pretty similar to that of Canola. Roundup Ready soybeans (produced by Monsanto) have been on the market for some time. The soybeans, which allowed farmers to spray an herbicide that kills all the plants in the field besides the soybeans themselves, have been a huge hit with market shares >90%. The benefit here is that being able to use herbicide resistant soybeans has been linked to increased use of no-till farming.* Bayer CropScience recently received regulatory approval for LibertyLink soybeans, their own herbicide + resistance system. Having another system is good for two reasons:

Competition brings down prices for farmers
Being able to rotate between two different herbicides prolongs the usefulness of both. Even if weeds develop some resistance to glyphosate (the active ingredient Roundup Ready crops are resistant to) the weeds are killed next year when the farmer sprays Glufosinate (the active ingredient that Liberty Link crops are resistant to).

About Soybeans: (more…)

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November 9, 2009

We’re Back

Filed under: Computers and Coding — Tags: ddos, hosting — James @ 4:15 pm

I apologize for the downtime today. This morning the server this site is hosted on apparently came under DDoS attack.* And just as my hosting provider was able to compensate, the bank of servers providing mySQL support went down (presumably from the strain inflicted by the DDoS attack, two unrelated failures in the same day from a service that’s normally pretty reliable seems unlikely).

So that’s why Jamesandthegiantcorn has been either unreachable or returning database errors all day, and I really am sorry.

In case you missed them while the site was down:

Last night there was a post on how some, but not all, corn uses chemical signals to attract nematodes when its roots are attacked by insect larva that the nematodes eat, and how that functionality can be restored in lines of corn that don’t normally have it with a signal transgene (with the presumption that introgressing the native corn gene would also work).

This morning the first in my series of profiles of genetically engineered plants that are commercially available, Canola, went up.

And orignally scheduled to go up around noon (in the middle of the outage), was an explanation of how I’m going to handle creating a resource on crops that have actually been genetically modified, since writing one long post was clearly something I was going to keep putting off indefinately.

Anyway, such attacks are just a part of life on the modern internet. Sometimes they come at random, sometimes they’re a way of shutting down sites the attacker doesn’t like. Since I share my server with a bunch of other people, we’ll probably never know why (if there even was a reason) we were attacked.

*DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. An attacker uses hundreds or even thousands of compromised computers across the world to attempt to access a site at once. The huge load swamps the host server to the point where it can’t respond to legitimate requests, and since the traffic is coming from lots of different computers with different addresses it’s hard to block it without also blocking the real people trying to access a site. And that doesn’t even take into account what happens when routers are so overwhelmed the datacenter personel can’t log into them to alter their settings. (Monty, if you’re reading this can you give an expert prespective on these attacks?)

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The plan on genetically engineered crop info

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: crops, genetic engineering, gmo — James @ 10:35 am

I tried to tackle it a couple of times over the weekend and ended up being intimidated by the amount of info, and also discouraged at the though of few people would want to read all the way through a long treatise on the subject.

So here’s what I’m going to do instead. Every morning at ~2 AM Pacific Time, a summary of a new genetically engineered crop will be posted on the site. The first one, Canola, should have come out this morning. (Please let me know about any mistakes you spot, or cool facts I didn’t mention.) Once there’s a post for every crop that’s currently genetically engineered, I’ll write up an actual page on the subject with links to all the relevant posts. Anyone who’s interested can point out anything I’ve written that is unclear or misleading, and then a link to that page will go up at the top of the site, next to “home” and “about”, to serve as a resource for anyone who needs it.

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Genetically Engineered Crops: Canola

Filed under: agriculture,biology,Crop Profiles,Genetics,Plants — Tags: bayer, canola, herbicide resistance, monsanto, vegetable oil — James @ 2:00 am

Field of Canola in Bloom. Photo: Joe Shlabotnik, flickr (click photo to view Joe's photostream)

Scientific name: Brassica napus

Genetically Engineered Traits: Herbicide Resistance.

Details of Genetic Engineering:

Two companies have produced canola that is resistant to different herbicides.

Monsanto sells canola (Roundup Ready canola) that is resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide monsanto sells under the brand name Roundup and lots of other companies sell under lots of other brand names since the herbicide itself recently came off patent (the resistance trait is still under patent.)

Bayer sells canola (Liberty Link canola) that resists the completely different, if similar sounding herbicide, glufosinate. Glufosinate is sold under a number of brand names (including, you guessed it, Liberty), but I wasn’t able to figure out whether or not it is still under patent.

About Canola:

Derived from the name “Canadian Oil” canola is an oilseed plant also known as rapeseed. The name change came in the 1970s when conventional breeding (this was approx. two decades before the first genetically engineered plants hit the market) created plants with healthier oil and without the bitter taste , and presumably someone to majored in advertising suggested that selling “Rape Oil” would be a good way to go bankrupt.

Two companies have produced canola that is resistant to different herbicides.

Monsanto sells canola (Roundup Ready canola) that is resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide Monsanto sells under the brand name Roundup and lots of other companies sell under lots of other brand names since the herbicide itself recently came off patent (the resistance trait is still under patent.)

About Canola:

Derived from the name “Canadian Oil” canola is breed of the oilseed crop rapeseed. The name change came in the 1970s when conventional breeding (this was approx. two decades before the first genetically engineered plants hit the market) created plants with healthier oil and without the bitter taste people associated with rapeseed oil, and presumably someone to majored in advertising suggested that selling “Rape Oil” would be a good way to go bankrupt.

Close up of Canola Flowers. Photo: Pollobarca2, flickr (click photo to see pollobarca2's photostream)

Rapeseed (the USDA doesn’t break out separate statistics for Canola) was the third biggest source of vegetable oils around the world in 2008-2009 at 20.5 million metric tons, coming in behind only soybeans and oil palms.

Canola is the main oil I use in my own cooking. Canola is apparently one of the healthier sources of vegetable oils, but the two things I most appreciate about it are the high smoke point (it’s harder to burn the oil itself*), and low cost. Last time I checked I was able to find a 48 oz bottle of canola oil for 2.99 which was better than local prices for peanut or corn oil. (Olive oil of course comes in much smaller containers that cost $10 or more, not at all suitable for graduate students.)

*Good for someone who is both as indifferent a cook, and as easily distracted as I am.

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November 8, 2009

Biological Control of Western Corn Rootworms

Filed under: agriculture,biology,Genetics,Plants — Tags: biological control, corn, maize, nematode, western root worm — James @ 8:52 pm

Face of the Enemy: Adult Western Corn Rootworm chewing on the silks of a corn ear. Picture from wikimedia, apparently in the public domain

This post discusses the paper Degenhardt, J et al. (2009) “Restoring a maize root signal that attracts insect-killing nematodes to control a major pest”

The Western Corn Rootworm (which as you can see from the picture to the right are not actually worms) is estimated to cost farmers in the US alone one billion dollars a year in lost yield and pest control measures. The newly hatched larva begin feeding on root hairs and as they get bigger start attacking the main roots of a corn plant. The damage to the roots from the feeding itself is exacerbated by the open wounds becoming infected. The loss of roots both stresses the plant and reduces yield by decreasing the plant’s supply of nutrients and water, but also makes it much more vulnerable to lodging (getting blown down by a gust of wind). Oh, and did I mention the adults like to feed on the corn plant’s reproductive tissues, decreasing yield even further?

Rootworms are one of the pests controlled by plants genetically engineered to express BT a protein taken from organic agriculture. Without it, the 1 billion dollar price tag for rootworm damage and control would be even higher. But this isn’t an article about bt, it’s an article about how some corn already knows how to call for help when rootworms attack.

Rootworm larva may feast on the roots of maize, but they are in turn eaten by some species of nematodes.* And it turns out some kinds of corn know how to attract nematodes, and when they’re under attack by rootworms they do just that. The nematodes get a delicious meal of rootworms and the corn plant gets to keep more of its roots intact.

How do corn plants attract their, unintentional, nematode defenders? (more…)

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