Lecture 26:
This lecture is a bit of a moralising spectacle about the White man’s burden to feed the brown masses of the world. There’s some useful bits to filter through, though.
By 2050, 2.4 billion people who cannot be sustained on current calorie-intake.
GMO- Genetically Modified Organisms:
Not new. IE: Dogs. Agriculture- 10 million years ago.
Clones are genetically identical individuals. Every hybrid rose, Dandelions, zebra fish are all clone.
Transgenic Organism: Altered gene due to an experimental intervention.
60% of processed food are GMO.
US Agriculture:
1900= 25% Lived on farms.
2000= <2%
Herbicides:
Herbicides reduce the competition from weeds so farmers can grow crops.
The herbicide Round Up contains Glyphosate, which is essentially an amino acid. It works by replacing the glyphosate sensitive enzyme in plants and replace it with an EPS bacteria (enol pyruvyl synthase) which is resistant to Glyphosate. So if you make a plant powered by this bacterial enzyme and plant a field with it, spraying it with Glyphosate will just kill the weeds.
Atrosyne (a dangerous herbicide) is similiar to Bisphenol A and it alters sex hormone production in mammals.
There is a fear that Glyphosate-resistant weeds will arise in the future- this is a valid fear.
Plant Genetic Engineering:
Plant leaves have agrobacterium cells in it.
There is a plasmid inside the Agrobacterium which contains T-DNA. T-DNA (Transposon) they are jumping genes that can move from one DNA molecule to another.
When agrobacterium reacts with a plant it moves close to the plant and does a conjugation reaction with the plant cell, the Ti-plasmid transfer to the plant cell’s nucleus. The T-DNA jumps randomly into the plant genome. The T-DNA contains enzymes for the synthesis of amino acids that help to create a plant tumour which protects bacteria from the environment. (Octopine and Nopitene). We can replace DNA in the T-DNA (like pryuvyl synthase).
Pamela Ronald- getting rice to tolerate flooding (4+ days of submergence) is a difficult case. She found certain strains of rice that were more resistant to flooding. She found the gene that allowed them to survive in flooding and incorporated it into produced rice.
Golden Rice:
In the endosperm of a grain of rice, there is a plastid that contains GGPP. All major civilisation milled rice to get rid of the layers of rot, but it contains beta carotene. IPP-FPP-GGPP-Phytoene-Lyopene-Lycopene-b-carotene.
They added a series of foreign genes/enzymes to rice which turned it a goldy colour and had a RDI of beta carotene in 1 cup of rice.
A deficiency of Beta carotene can lead to blindness.
Animal Cloning:
Ian Wilmut cloned a sheep “Dolly” in 1995 -even when it was thought to be impossible.
Yamanaka (scientist) took: Agouti mouse, black mouse and white mouse. Can you take the nucleus from a somatic (non-stem cell) and create a whole mouse from this cell? He took a cumulus cells from agouti, and removed the nucleus, super ovulated black strand mouse and ovulated it, removed haploid oocytes (female egg cells) from which they removed the nucleus and inserted the agouti (diploid( nucleus cell. Stimulate oocytes in right way, it divides into a blastocyst, inject into a pregnant white mice, and that white mice gives birth to an agouti pups.
We can now take somatic cells and create stem cells from them. IE: Edit out the HIV co-receptor gene from human cells.
Racist! Yes, the white man must study hard so that he can feed a world full of dinks and kinks.
I watched lecture 26. Just a couple of minor corrections: nopaline and 35% percent were farmers in 1900 according to him.