Science Re-engineering Potatoes To Remove Their All-Natural Toxins

Hackaday Article

Family Solanum (nightshade) is generally associated with toxins, and for good reasons, as most of the plants in this family are poisonous. This includes some of everyone’s favorite staple vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant, with especially potatoes responsible for many poisonings each year. In the case of harvested potatoes, the chemical responsible (steroidal glycoalkaloids, or SGA) is produced when the potato begins to sprout. Now a team of researchers at the University of California have found a way to silence the production of the responsible protein: GAME15.

The research was published in Science, following earlier research by the Max Planck Institute. The researchers deleted the gene responsible for GAME15 in Solanum nigrum (black nightshade) to confirm that the thus modified plants produced no SGA. In the case of black nightshade there is not a real need to modify them as – like with tomatoes – the very tasty black berries they produce are free of SGA, and you should not eat the SGA-filled and very bitter green berries anyway, but it makes for a good test subject.

Ultimately the main benefits of this research appear to be in enriching our general understanding of these self-toxicity mechanisms of plants, and in making safer potatoes that can be stored without worries about them suddenly becoming toxic to eat.

Top image: Different potato varieties. (Credit: Scott Bauer, USDA ARS)

Mmm, no more deadly potatoes. WHAT HAS SCIENCE WROUGHT

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Like how bananas jave shit int hem that can cause your retinas to detatch in high enough concentrations?

I knew they were radioactive but I missed that one

 

[The Lawgiver]

I knew they were radioactive but I missed that one

IIRC it's the potassium.
EDIT: Nope, vitamin C. FUCK.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

IIRC it's the potassium.

hrm, glancing online "potassium detached retina" doesn't come up with much
not trying to be a dick at you, it's just that I down a mess of potassium pills each night for restless leg among other reasons, so I was quite concerned about getting another detached retina, this time without getting knocked in the noggin

 

[Soycast Guy]

hrm, glancing online "potassium detached retina" doesn't come up with much
not trying to be a dick at you, it's just that I down a mess of potassium pills each night for restless leg among other reasons, so I was quite concerned about getting another detached retina, this time without getting knocked in the noggin

Nah I do remember there being shit about how there’s a small amount of radiation in bananas, but you’d have to eat so much that it’s pretty much impossible to actually get harmed. You’d sooner get harmed from overeating, really.

 

[The Lawgiver]

hrm, glancing online "potassium detached retina" doesn't come up with much
not trying to be a dick at you, it's just that I down a mess of potassium pills each night for restless leg among other reasons, so I was quite concerned about getting another detached retina, this time without getting knocked in the noggin

Looked it up and it WAS something in the banana, just not the potassium. It's vitamin C.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Looked it up and it WASsomething in the banana, just not the potassium. It's vitamin C.

ah, okay cool thanks

 

[kcbbq]

hrm, glancing online "potassium detached retina" doesn't come up with much
not trying to be a dick at you, it's just that I down a mess of potassium pills each night for restless leg among other reasons, so I was quite concerned about getting another detached retina, this time without getting knocked in the noggin

You have to eat hundreds of bananas every day to get to toxic levels of anything and potassium would be first. It's something like 100lbs a day. Probably more to get to the point your heart gives out.

 

[Positron]

It will not catch on because GM food will not be accredited "organic".

 

[High Level Rad Waste]

Just replant them if they start going green. The skin'll start peeling with that waxy shit underneath too.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Potatos (and every other nightshade we eat, like tomatoes and eggplant) in no way match wild ones because they're all as poisonous as any other nightshade. This is no different that the many centuries of selective breeding that's been done to give us the mutants we already eat. The only difference is this is faster and more reliable.

We can't be 100% sure the only difference is it's more reliable, without the passage of time and good, honest studies we can't know for certain the long-term effects of meddling with our food supply. We've only been doing this since the 90's and it wasn't nearly as common then.

The law of unintended consequences is a thing, and often when there's a significant change in human diets it only seems to make people fatter and sicker, even when we're told it'll not only have no effect but the opposite effect. Even if it doesn't effect us directly it might have some other ecological consequence.

So wouldn't removing the toxin from nightshade plants also make them vulnerable to the pests that those toxins evolved to prevent? Wouldn't this mean that now even more chemicals and pesticides would need to be added during growing to compensate for the lack of the plant's own natural defenses making these more expensive to grow and arguably more toxic to humans? Also, this kind of shit usually comes with patents and terminator seeds and nasty shit you want to keep far away from your crops.

That's the line of thinking I'm taking about. There's a lot to consider.

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

It will not catch on because GM food will not be accredited "organic".

Only retards buy organic anyway.
We already have GM cultivars of potatoes that people buy the shit out of every day.

 

[Coldgrip]

Imagine being such a bugman that you need to soyence potatoes because you're too dumb to not eat the green ones.

Just kill yourself at that point.

 

[TowinKarz]

Nah I do remember there being shit about how there’s a small amount of radiation in bananas, but you’d have to eat so much that it’s pretty much impossible to actually get harmed. You’d sooner get harmed from overeating, really.

Some nuclear engineer on YouTube crunched the numbers, and, it's basically 10,000,000 bananas in one sitting.... something that you'd die TRYING to do before the radiaton ever became the faintest probability of an issue....

Google throws up a lot of different numbers if asked.

I looked to verify.

But, even those other numbers are magnitudes more than you could eat without killing yourself from the eating alone (Lowest I've seen was 4,000, high was 50,000,000)

 

[The Lawgiver]

Imagine being such a bugman that you need to soyence potatoes because you're too dumb to not eat the green ones.

Just kill yourself at that point.

It's not even just the green ones, they're now suddenly framing potatoes having mild amounts of natural toxins as SUPER DANGEROUS AND UNHEALTHY. Odd they don't do the same thing for the fucking pesticides that clearly sink into some crops or like everything else out there that's infinitely worse for your health. IIRC some of those don't filter out like the potato toxins do.

 

[WonderWino]

hrm, glancing online "potassium detached retina" doesn't come up with much
not trying to be a dick at you, it's just that I down a mess of potassium pills each night for restless leg among other reasons, so I was quite concerned about getting another detached retina, this time without getting knocked in the noggin

wait what? Potassium is good for treating restless legs?

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

wait what? Potassium is good for treating restless legs?

maybe?
it might be placebo, I dunno
I started taking them as part of a homebrew hangover prevention but yeah it seems to help with it

or at least it keeps me from fulling waking up when it bugs me so I can fall back asleep
it seems to help with going back to sleep after my cat wakes me up for food too

 

[kim foxx]

i've been eating potatoes with green skin for years with no ill effects. just peel the green bing bong simple

 

[Marvin]

For the types of potatoes most of the world will ever see, yes.

If you're one of those weirdos who wants to have an authentic visit to South America, not necessarily. Parts of South America are worse than Japan for their need to eat poisonous foods that need to be cooked juuuuust right to not make you horribly sick or dead.

In the US south they eat pokeweed, a poisonous as fuck plant. They have to boil the leaves and drain the water, and go through a few cycles of this before they leeched out enough of the poison to make it edible.

As a kid I remember the dark purple berries, because they were fun to squish and smear on shit to write with. I only learned later that they are poisonous as shit.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

In the US south they eat pokeweed, a poisonous as fuck plant. They have to boil the leaves and drain the water, and go through a few cycles of this before they leeched out enough of the poison to make it edible.

As a kid I remember the dark purple berries, because they were fun to squish and smear on shit to write with. I only learned later that they are poisonous as shit.

them berries were fun

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The green stuff in potatoes is basically harmless and more of a quality defect than causing actual harm, unless you eat a loooooooot of really old, rotten potates.

Personally, if you were going to engineer foods to get rid of toxins, I'd recommend stuff like acorns, mushrooms, or cashews (the cashew nut is actually quite toxic, any "raw" cashew you buy is already partially steamed).