Imagine what these guys would do if consumers had a clear,
easy way of measuring nourishment outcomes: in the food and in themselves. They
would follow the demand and create nourishing food instead of high sugar corn.
Nutritional content and outcome is not the metric today; but it is coming,
along with consumer devices to measure those.
Read this highly informative article from Wired.
Monsanto’s gene chipper “maps the parts of a genome that
might be associated with a given trait, even if that trait arises from multiple
genes working in concert. Researchers identify and cross plants with traits
they like and then run millions of samples from the hybrid—just bits of leaf,
really—through a machine that can read more than 200,000 samples per week and
map all the genes in a particular region of the plant’s chromosomes.
“They had more toys too. In 2006, Monsanto developed a
machine called a seed chipper that quickly sorts and shaves off widely varying
samples of soybean germplasm from seeds. The seed chipper lets researchers scan
tiny genetic variations, just a single nucleotide, to figure out if they’ll
result in plants with the traits they want—without having to take the time to
let a seed grow into a plant. Monsanto computer models can actually predict
inheritance patterns, meaning they can tell which desired traits will
successfully be passed on. It’s breeding without breeding, plant sex in silico.
In the real world, the odds of stacking 20 different characteristics into a
single plant are one in 2 trillion. In nature, it can take a millennium.
Monsanto can do it in just a few years. And this all happens without any
genetic engineering. Nobody inserts a single gene into a single genome.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/new-monsanto-vegetables/
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