7/7/2004: Blue roses

Blue roses. This was thought to be impossible until Suntory and Australian bio venture FlorigenePty, Ltd., figured it out. They took blue color pigment from blue flowers, and then used "recombinant DNA techniques" to add them to the roses. I put quotes around "recombinant DNA techniques" to say that I have no clue what that exactly entails, so if the caption writer got it wrong I got it wrong.

Back in the day there was some sort of CODE that went along with roses... where different colors had different specific meanings, like red for love, white for friendship, yellow for peeing yourself with excitement, and so forth. So what's blue? "I'd like you to join our group of zombies." I dunno.

Looks more like lavender blue......................dilly, dilly.

They could be "Thankyou for contributing to the cellar" roses.. they match our colours!!

"You take my breath away"

I'll go with "periwinkle."

we use to do that with daisies in grade school. after you cut them you put them in a glass of water with food color in it and the petals would turn what ever color you had in the water. I'm not impressed.

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Originally Posted by jojomonkeygirl we use to do that with daisies in grade school. after you cut them you put them in a glass of water with food color in it and the petals would turn what ever color you had in the water. I'm not impressed.

I have to chime in and say, these are lavender roses. I have seen natural roses close to this color. Show me navy blue, genetian blue, or sky blue, and I will be impressed. But mauvish purpley periwinkle roses are not press-release worthy. You've got to get the red out.

Visine gets the red out?

How unimpressive.

A little more info from Japan Today (July 1, 2004):

TOKYO — Suntory Ltd said Wednesday it has developed the world's first biotechnology-driven blue roses. In a project Suntory started in 1990 with its Australian bio-venture subsidiary Florigene Pty Ltd, researchers have been trying to develop blue roses by extracting blue-pigment genes from other plants, such as petunias, and implanting them into roses.

Suntory said it eventually succeeded in creating blue pigment in roses by implanting the gene that leads to the synthesis of blue pigment from pansies. Unlike roses created by using conventional breeding technologies, the roses developed in the Suntory project have almost 100% Delphinidin in their petals, which has made new and very different blue roses possible. (Kyodo News)



It still doesn't look blue and I'd be bummed if this were the culmination of 14 years of work. I wonder what it smells like.

It reminds me <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> by Tennessee Williams...

That's a pretty uncommon color for roses, I'd figure, no matter how they were grown. Normally all you see is white, pink and red, unless you frequent greenhouses that may have more. I saw some tangerine-y colored ones once at a greenhouse.

I'm with hermex though... show me some ultramarine blue roses and I'll want to know where I can get some. Love me some black roses too.

I think the point is the success of the genetic alteration. the color is nice to demonstrate it, but more important is the WAY they did it. that kind of freaks me out a little. i know theY genetically modify food, and i dont trust that.

[quote=Undertoad I have no clue what that exactly entails [/QUOTE]


jerking hand in the air and practically falling out of chair: OOH OOH, I know this one!!

i do this on a regular basis, the recombinant DNA stuff...except in animal cells not plants.

the generic version is taking a gene of interest from one organism, and putting it in the cells of another. in this example they took the dna that codes for making the blue pigment (the gene) out of flower A and put it in flower B's cells, so that flower B now makes it like it would have it's own pigment.

it's sort of like word processing where you just cut a sentance out of one book and paste it in another, but on a different scale. the language is the same, so the reader (the cells protein making machinery) just goes on translating the new stuff with the old (as if you were reading a paragraph with the new sentance inserted). because dna is dna is dna, the second organism doesn't 'know' that this new gene isn't one of it's own and just goes about tranlating it like all the rest if it's own genes. like a book though, you have to have the new word (or gene) be in context with the rest of the story or it won't make any sense (or, the new protein won't be made or expressed properly in the new organism). this is what takes so long, trying to get the new word (gene) to make sense (be properly translated into a good protein) with the rest of the story (the rest of the proteins in the organism).

there will be a quiz later, i hope you took notes

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/Bio...rdna/rdna.html

http://www.accessexcellence.org/AB/I...uage_rDNA.html

a couple of sites that don't use too much jargon to explain this, i'll try to find more better ones with prettier pictures

this is my passion BTW

If you've had McDonald's fries, you've et GE food, engineered to produce potatoes that are longer than the usual in order to fit into their fry holders and be easily eaten.

just a little mini-fact

yeah, that's what i was thinking. i don't trust MAN to figure out, in a few years, what it took evolution millions of years to perfect. there HAS to be something they've missed. but then, i'm a hippie weirdo, so.....

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Originally Posted by Beestie You did see Attack of the Killer Tomatoes did you not?

when i taught my undergrads as a grad student, and we were on the topic of biotechnology someone would always bring up how eating bioengeneered food could be harmful. so i explained it this way:

no matter what you are eating, carrot, pork chop, filet mignon, you are consuming (among other things) the dna of that thing. you have yet to turn green from your side salad, or sprout udders after cosuming a big mac, because the dna is degraded in your stomach.

human beings have been 'genetically engineering' food for as long as they have been around. we select two of the most proliferative tomato plants and cross pollinate them, so we get a whole batch of proliferative plants. then we take the most productive two from that batch and do it over. i did this for a summer when i worked for pioneer except we were criossing soybeans for their oil content. this is also BTW how natural selection works...only mother nature is doing the selecting.

Olestra, like pretty much all replacement fats and sugars is about the worst 'food' you can eat, all of that stuff is nasty and nearly all has well demonstrated side effects.

As for GE in general, it's a nice idea but the testing being done is nowhere near through enough, nowhere near long enough and the negative results seem to be being glossed over as minor hiccups. I have about as much faith in Monsanto being interested in the good of the public as Saddam being careful about huamn rights. Beyond that the whole thing is fucked up because companies can own genes, yet another example of how utterly screwed our entire IP system is becoming.

I understand the relationship between GE and natural selection but there is no way naturally a sequence from a cod is going to end up in a potato in one generation. It's not just enhancing natural selection, it's doing things that in no way could naturally occur, that's a fundamental difference.

Lobbiests in the US have your government so tightly by the balls the idea of labelling GM never was very trendy, over here people get seriously anal about it and it's helped spark off a major organic food movement as well, there are now massive selections of organic products in all major supermarkets. While there are questions about the requirements for some of the labelling people taking a stronger interest in the quality of their food can only be a good thing.

Oh I know why it's being done, the profit motive is huge. Particularly monsanto who have created this funky synergy (argh, I can't beleive I just used that) between RoundUp and their GE crops that not only locks farmers into only using their seed but only their chemicals as well.

Sometimes I think the greatest problem with humanity is our willingness to trade quality for price.

I think the big difference (speaking as someone who hasn't set foot in a bio lab since ninth grade), is that when you cross tomatoes, you get tomato DNA + tomato DNA, which can basically only yield tomato DNA; you really are doing nothing different than nature has done for billions of years, or animals/people have done for millions.

However, when you want to put insulin production into your eggplants, or whatever (which is a totally cool goal, actually; the medical uses of GM seem a lot more worth the risk, to me), you're mixing eggplant DNA + pig insulin DNA. Which nature hasn't been doing, as far as I know. So, while you might be getting insulin just fine, there's no precedent for what else these two disparate DNA's will do together. Clearly, it's not the deoxyribonucleic acid itself that you're concerned about when you eat the GM food; it's the organism itself, and its products and byproducts.

i hate how all these pictures of new technology always show a smiling japanese girl! its so annoying!

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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce Looks more like lavender blue......................dilly, dilly.

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Originally Posted by Guess i hate how all these pictures of new technology always show a smiling japanese girl! its so annoying!

right. talk about fucking with the primordial ooze.....

You're right glatt. It's a similar syndrome to hospitals - all the drugs help breed some really nasty little fuckers that will make SARS (which was blown out of all proportion anyway) look like nothing. In short, we eat shit.

There is always this little voice in the back of my head that occasionally reminds me I might quite easily have eaten BCE meat when I lived in England (which means I can't give blood for about 30 odd years) and won't know about it for another 20 or so.

Every time I think of The Glass Menagerie, I keep thinking of that sketch from The State that features the US men's bikini thong roller blading team.

When I saw these I immediately thought of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Nice, but I also think they are more purple than blue. It could be just the way they come up in the photos, though.

This is the poetry police, you're under arrest for 1 class grevious bodily harm of the english language, step away from the keyboard and keep your hands where we can see them.

Fine, xoxoxoBruce, just hide behind a handle impossible to implement into a poem. what the hell kind of meter is /u/u/u/ anyway? It's just not fair.

I chose it, specifically to be poem proof, at least good poem proof.

there once was a bruce with some letters
left aspiring poets in fetters
seasoned cellarites failed
but a lurker prevailed
and he earned the respect of his betters

Quote:

Originally Posted by Syrinx You just have to wait the several weeks for them to sprout, grow, and bloom!

Another, and much cooler, example of cutting and pasting DNA from one organism to another is Glofish Glofish. Glofish are zebrafish(1) that have had a fluorescent gene from jellyfish pasted into their DNA.

As far as the ethical concerns for GM organisms goes, I tend to think that Montesano is overstepping our knowledge of how organisms actually work, the redundancy built into organisms to allow reproduction after damage, and the fact that plant DNA is damaged in the field by pollution and UV light from the sun. GM is going to be given a bad name by these early trials with supposedly sterile plants, because they're trying to do more than add a single protein into the plants; they're messing with things that aren't understood yet. In terms of glofish and purple roses, however, I don't think there's much (if any) harm that they could do since they're genetically nearly the same as non-GM organisms, but slightly less competitive in the wild due to the extra protein they are making.

[edit: Making the link work]

a few letters from tic-tac-toe
tacked in front of a name that you know
has great dodads to share
but no shelf space to spare
still his collection continues to grow!

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Originally Posted by Elspode Well, yeah...but you have to do that with the flowers that you cut and put into food coloring, too.

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Originally Posted by Undertoad Back in the day there was some sort of CODE that went along with roses... where different colors had different specific meanings, like red for love, white for friendship, yellow for peeing yourself with excitement, and so forth. So what's blue? "I'd like you to join our group of zombies." I dunno.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce I chose it, specifically to be poem proof, at least good poem proof.

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Originally Posted by Guess i hate how all these pictures of new technology always show a smiling japanese girl! its so annoying!

OK. So how long does it take to e-mail a 3 megapixel image over the cell phone? Like a day or something? Or are they improving the infrastructure too?

Or am I just not getting it? Are you supposed to take it home and put the card in your card reader?

I think you can take a low-res image to transmit over the phone, or a high-res image to take home.