Training crops to survive floods...

[kemist]

Perhaps T&T should look into this as well:
link

As Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Australia, the UK, and US have all faced catastrophic flooding in recent years, tolerance of crops to partial or complete submergence is a key target for global food security. Because they are starved for oxygen, crops are unable to survive a flood for long periods of time, leading to drastic reductions in yields for farmers.

Discovery of the mechanism by which plants sense low oxygen levels could eventually lead to the production of high-yielding, flood-tolerant crops.

The mechanism, reported in the journal Nature, controls key proteins in plants that cause them to be unstable when oxygen levels are normal. When roots or shoots are flooded and oxygen levels drop, the proteins stabilize.

Holdsworth and colleague Julia Bailey-Serres, professor of genetics at the University of California, Riverside, expect that the findings will make it possible over the next decade to manipulate the protein turnover mechanism in a wide range of crops prone to damage by flooding.

[kemist]

I haven't yet read the article in Nature, but i'm just wondering, even if they are able to manipulate the proteins, how do they solve the problem of oxygen deficiency - the plant may still starve. The only two things i can think about is
(1) genetically altering the plant so it can survive on low levels of oxygen & low metabolism - does this mean that the nutrition value of the plant would decrease?
(2) Would manipulating the proteins only work in cases where the crops are not under flood waters for too long?

[Falcon]

And would this increase the amounts of water required for a crop?

But that is really early stages yet.....

if you have access to the article then please send me a pdf

[edyle]

What is really being discussed here is GENETIC ENGINEERING of FOOD crops.

The corporations that do most successfully do this are the ones who engineer crops not for survivability to floods (although that would be a side effect) but for PROFITABILITY to the corporation.