A new seed process could cut crop replanting costs

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:29:25

   it does need to get updated um so my day job is running a company called ohalo and what we do at ohalo is we turn off meiosis and plants okay what does that mean very sexy yeah that's it so that's the pitch i give at the bar um and uh you know i usually get the blanks there and then i uh so yeah so all the cells in our body we talked about this earlier are made through a process called mitosis which copies over the whole all the dna in your cell your dna is actually packaged up into chromosomes and there's two sets of chromosomes side by side in your cell I don't know.

2. 1:30:00

   So those two sets of chromosomes get copied over every time you make a new cell in your body, except for sperm and eggs. So when you make sperm or eggs, you only copy one chromosome, one set of chromosomes. And it's not just a selection of one of the sets. What happens is the two sets of chromosomes fuse, and they fuse at random places. so you get a random half of one chromosome a random half of the other chromosome and that's why every sperm which has just one set of chromosomes is genetically different everyone is unique and every egg in a female is unique they're all genetically different because that fusion event which is called meiosis fuses the two chromosomes down to one and then a sperm and an egg come together and you end up back with two and that's the new offspring and every offspring

3. 1:30:49

   looks a little bit different because every sperm is different and every egg is different. That's why kids all look different even though they come from the same two parents. So they get half the genes from the mother, half the genes from the father and it's a random half from the mother, random half from the father. And meiosis drives that evolutionary process. That random selection is what is evolution.

4. 1:31:07

   It's the source of evolution. By turning off, and this is fundamentally a challenge for farming. Number one, because most crops, people don't realize this, you can't plant seed. When farmers plant seed in the ground, the reason they use seed is because they're going to get the same genetics in the field. You want all the corn to grow at the same time so you can harvest it all at the same time. It's all going to look the same. You can sell it all to the same person and it's the same crop. You don't want to harvest a bunch of tomatoes where some are green, some are yellow, some are red. They're all different sizes. How are you going to market that? That's not marketable. So the seed industry came about about 100 years ago when this guy figured out that you could actually inbreed plants and when you inbreed a plant so

5. 1:31:53

   a plant has both male and female parts unlike animals most plants will make sperm and egg you can pollinate itself and if you do that for seven generations both chromosomes end up identical because remember the two chromosomes have the same genes but if the genes are different you have different alleles and if the genes are the same that's called homozygots are the same alleles so if both chromosomes end up being identical and you make sperm it doesn't matter where the fusion happens every sperm will look the same it'll because they're the exact same two chromosomes same with egg so inbreeding is what was developed about 100 years ago where they inbred plants, seven generations, took the inbreds, crossed them, and now every seed is identical.

6. 1:32:36

   That's how they make identical seed, in corn, in tomato, in cotton, in canola, in sorghum. And farmers went to a seed company and they started buying seed for the first time ever. And they put that seed in the ground and they could grow a crop. And every year, the other thing it does is it allows you to improve the yield every year because the plant breeder would try and make the two chromosomes from the two backgrounds different.

7. 1:32:59

   The more different they are, the more complementary they are, the more different genes you're putting in that plant, the higher the yield, the faster the plant grows. Plants are really interesting because they're kind of like looking for tools in a tool belt. Like, how many tools do I have? How many different genes do I have that I can use any second of any day to keep growing? Humans and animals, we just grow like two arms, five fingers, two eyes, two legs, and we're done growing.

8. 1:33:24

   And then our job is to go out and find food and survive. Plants, their job is to keep growing. They grow roots, they grow branches, they grow leaves. The sun's over there, I'm going to grow a branch towards the sun, I'm going to make more leaves. Oh, the water's down there, I'm going to grow a root down there. And they just keep growing and growing and growing until they die. So plants are always looking for more genes in the toolbox that they can use to grow.

9. 1:33:43

   So by turning off meiosis, we can take plants that don't have seed today, put two of them together and all the seed will now be the same because every sperm is the same every egg is the same because by turning off meiosis both chromosomes go into the sperm both chromosomes go into the egg and now the offspring has four chromosomes instead of two that might sound crazy but many many plants have four chromosome versions it's called polyploidy polyploid many versions of the chromosome and uh some like modern wheat is hexaploid it has six chromosomes modern strawberries octoploid it has eight chromosomes modern potatoes tetraploid it has four chromosomes so many modern kind of crops have multiple copies of the chromosome and you can't make seed in those crops and so you end up taking the plant chopping it up and replanting it

10. 1:34:32

    and that's what they do so by making seed it actually saves farmers the majority of their expense which they have to spend money chopping up all the old plants putting them back on the ground and it allows us to make better plants every generation because we can make better selections on the ones that are complementary to each other increasing the genetic diversity in the crop increasing disease resilience drought resistance um climate change adaptation all the things that drive yield and make the farmers more profitable make more food per acre all these sorts of things and then every year instead of having Like in the US, we're farming Russ at Burbank. We've been farming Russ at Burbank for 150 years. We can now bring new potatoes to market every year that are getting better and healthier, more nutritious, more adapted to climate change, making the farmer more money. And so you can kind of, and the farmer, instead of using 5,000 pounds of chopped up potatoes, and like Matt Garman did, and putting them in the ground, he can use 10 grams of seed that fits in the palm of your hand.

11. 1:35:25

    Wow. So it cuts down on his expenses like crazy. He makes more money and we make more food. So that's the business I run. And so, you know, we figured out a way to turn off meiosis and do this. And then we've also developed a lot of other technology to make plant breeding more efficient, to increase the rate of yield gain, to increase the adaptation of the climate, to increase all of these things that are going on in agriculture that make it very hard to farm.

12. 1:35:48

    Can you make it so that you need less fertilizer? Yeah, absolutely. So nitrogen utilization is a kind of good phenotype to think about. So you can kind of, you know, because you got to apply nitrogen to grow most crops. And then there's also work now on, which we don't do today, but there's some work that's being done. Some crops like soybeans and legumes, they actually can suck nitrogen out of the atmosphere.

13. 1:36:12

    You don't need fertilizer. And it actually refertilizes the soil from the air. And so there's ways to kind of integrate that into crops that don't have that. so there's a whole bunch of that sort of technology that's going on as well wow that is cool what