One of the age old pains of living with a yard is cutting the grass. Well, some of you like it because it gives you time to zone out and not interact with people. But for the most of us, it’s just time we could be using doing something more important like, er, building laser microphones. Anyway, researchers at the Salk Institute may have come up with one way to keep the grass really green and short. Ahhh, now I can work on that laser microphone.
Joanne Chory discovered a gene, called BAS-1 (phyB activation-tagged suppressor1), that can be used to inhibit or enhance growth. “BAS-1 appears to control the level of an important steroid hormone that stimulates growth in plant cells,” said Joanne Chory, professor at the Salk Institute. Chory and the other researchers keyed in on brassinolide hormones that seemed to regulate plant growth. “It appears that brassinolide is made through the plant and then growth is controlled by selectively inactivating it,” said Chory. “BAS-1 performs this step in stems, and so switching on BAS-1 will halt stem elongation.”
And so I look forward to a day when my lawn grows no longer than I want it to. Now that’s control. But all this monkeying with genetics has some people in an uproar. This was especially the case when last year a genetically engineered grass was found living in the wild. The grass was developed for golf courses and is resistant to the herbicide Roundup. That resistance could spread to other varieties of plants and pose a very real nuisance. This particular bentgrass was developed by Scotts. But I’m sure we will be hearing about more “unintended consequences” in the future.
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