Genetically modifying crops to make them more colorful could make it easier to spot weeds and allow farmers to produce food without using pesticides, scientists say.
In the future, this will become increasingly important as hardy, climate-tolerant weeds are cultivated for food, the authors say in a report published in the journal Trends in Plant Science. It is stated in.
Michael Palmgren, a plant scientist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author, told the Guardian: Anything can work at scale. As we begin to breed weeds, the challenge of distinguishing between weeds and crops becomes immediate. ”
New crops are difficult to distinguish from weeds, so finding ways to tell them apart will be important, he said. The paper suggests that crop genomes could be modified to express pigments such as anthocyanins, which give blueberries their color, and carotenoids, which give carrots their orange color.
“One example we gave in our opinion piece is the fat chicken (Akaza album) is cultivated in India and Nepal for its nutritious seeds and was a food source for Europe during the Iron Age. Seeds are often found in the stomach of bodies in wetlands,” Palmgren said.
“Today it is a powerful and competitive weed in European fields and can cause serious losses to crops.” Some people say, “Why not create a new sustainable crop that doesn't need it?” If this becomes a reality, how do you tell the difference between an improved fat hen and a wild, weedy fat hen? It is the same species and changes can only be observed once the seeds develop. ”
Genetic science helped discover the genes responsible for the desirable traits that our ancestors selected for in crop plants. This means that new crops with these traits can be bred much more quickly using genetic engineering. Many wild plants are more resilient to extreme weather events and other climate-related impacts than current crops, so breeding them could help prevent food shortages due to climate change.
But these new crops are likely to resemble the weeds for which they were bred, so to make their weeding easier without the use of pesticides, scientists are using robotic weeders to eliminate weeds. We suggest creating visually distinctive plants that can be easily distinguished from each other.
“Distinguishing these new crops from their less productive, closely related wild plants may pose a major challenge for weed control,” the researchers wrote. “Using gene editing to enhance visual recognition by weeding robots could effectively address this problem.”
