Plants! We\u2019ve been experimenting with them through farming and breeding for ages and we\u2019ve had many successes (just look\u00a0how corn has changed from its ancestral form<\/a>\u00a0for a great example). Nonetheless, more can be done to lower costs, increase variety, and improve nutrition (among other things). Here are just a few things I\u2019ve learned about recently \u2013 engineering more stable animal feed, changing flower color, and making apples that don\u2019t brown.<\/p>\n Cheese burgers are delicious. However, to keep making cheese burgers, we need to keep making cows. A lot of money and resources go into making the tasty animals we eat (a good reason to be vegetarian at least some of the time) and farmers are always looking for ways to decrease costs.<\/p>\n Luckily, plant researchers have taken note. One way researchers are trying to lower farming costs is by making plants used for animal feed more stable. The plants we feed to animals often need to be stored prior to feeding and their nutritional components can degrade during storage. Scientists at the USDA are specifically\u00a0altering alfalfa<\/a>\u00a0(apparently a component of feed) so that it produces chemicals that keep its proteins from degrading. This stronger alfalfa could some day lead to healthier, less expensive animal feed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Have you ever wanted a particular type of flower to come in a different color? Plant breeders have been changing flower colors for years by crossing different varieties together. The process of altering the genes present in a particular plant (really what you\u2019re doing in plant breeding) may be more straightforward and controllable if performed using genetic engineering techniques.<\/p>\n Toward this end, researchers recently used the genetic engineering tool,\u00a0CRISPR<\/a>, to\u00a0change the Japanese Morning Glory from violet to white<\/a>. This specific color change isn\u2019t groundbreaking as there were already white Japanese Morning Glories, but it shows that CRISPR can be used to quickly get a desired color if we know enough about the underlying biology.<\/p>\n The company\u00a0Revolution Bioengineering<\/a>\u00a0is doing something perhaps a little more exciting \u2013 they\u2019re making flowers that change color overtime. I\u2019m intrigued to see how things turn out!<\/p>\n I often find myself cringing before taking a bite out of a brown apple slice that\u2019s been out for too long so I was excited to discover that the company\u00a0Okanagan Specialty Fruits<\/a>\u00a0makes genetically modified, non-browning apples (see description on their blog<\/a>). They call them \u201cArctic Apples<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Apparently these apples have been in production for a while but they\u2019ve only been sold in the U.S. since early 2017. Full disclosure, I haven\u2019t eaten them yet and can\u2019t vouch for their taste, but I\u2019d love to try them out.<\/p>\n There\u2019s all sorts of other stuff going on in the world of plant biology and I\u2019m hoping to touch on some fancy things like plant metabolic modeling and engineering carbon fixation in later posts. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Plants! We\u2019ve been experimenting with them through farming and breeding for ages and we\u2019ve had many successes (just look\u00a0how corn has changed from its ancestral form\u00a0for a great example). Nonetheless, more can be done to lower costs, increase variety, and improve nutrition (among other things). Here are just a few things I\u2019ve learned about recently … <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tylerjford.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Cow.jpg?resize=236%2C300\")
1. Making More Stable Animal Feed<\/h3>\n![\"Japanese](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tylerjford.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Japanese-Morning-Glory.jpg?resize=228%2C300\")
2. Changing Flower Color<\/h2>\n![\"Cartoon](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tylerjford.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Browning-Apple.jpg?resize=300%2C259\")
3. Marking Non-browning Apples (Arctic Apples)<\/h2>\n