Tag Archives: Reid Williams

Personalized agriculture

They talk a lot about personalized medicine (drugs and procedures specifically formulated for individuals) but this is the first time I’ve come across ‘personalized’ agriculture. According to the article (not dated for some reason, I did find it last week [Oct. 31 – Nov. 4, 2011]) by Christopher Mims for Fast Company,

For centuries, farmers have been trying to tweak their practices to get plants to grow well. But what if the plants could tell you exactly what they needed, and you could engineer one that was perfect for your farm?

Agriculture has a problem. Its one-size-fits-all model requires outsize amounts of pesticide, fertilizer, and water to create a homogenous environment for a homogenized product. Monocropping means covering as much area as possible with a single, often genetically identical crop, and commercial genetic modification techniques only exacerbate the problem by self-destructing after a single generation, preventing seed-saving and the development of new varieties by farmers themselves.

Nature long ago solve this problem through the process of mass customization we know as natural selection. Now the challenge for agricultural scientists is to reintroduce biodiversity in the one place it’s been most thoroughly eradicated–the industrialized farm.

Mims notes this is at the idea stage only.

“Plants sense their environment and exhibit sophisticated responses–the idea is to engineer that,” says Reid Williams, a PhD candidate at UCSF [University of California at San Francisco] who also worked on the project.

We already know that plants can sense gravity, touch, and probably dozens of other environmental factors. Regardless of their innate responses, all living things also encode information about their environment through a process called DNA methylation. When DNA is methylated, it changes its expression during the life of an organism, and there are ways to determine precisely which genes have been altered in this way.

Add some “big data” to this equation–massive, automated studies that statistically match DNA changes to the conditions in which a plant is grown–and you could begin to build a system that can examine the genetic code of a particular plant and spit out a record of the conditions in which it developed. Something along these lines has already been developed, namely a plant that turns red in the presence of land mines.

The endpoint for this new thinking about agriculture would be ‘personalized’ seeds.

The ultimate result would be “personalized seeds” (think of it in terms of personalized medicine) that are tailored to the environment in which they’ll grow. This application of synthetic biology turns the usual sequence of events in agriculture on its head.  …

… the name of this field, synthetic biology, which implies that humans are at the stage that we are in a position to directly influence the substance of evolution itself, and not just in the accidental ways we have in the past. [emphases mine]

Or perhaps we’ve found a new way to further our delusion that we can control life.