Posted on 08/25/2003 9:24:28 PM PDT by woofie
Glowing green ooze, it's not.
The thought of Los Alamos National Laboratory - the nation's premier nuclear weapons lab - developing a plant-growth technology at first sounds scary.
Don't worry. There's nothing to fear, a scientist at the lab says.
The product, called Take-Off, is a carefully thought-out, environmentally friendly substance that helps plants grow 10 percent to 35 percent faster than normal. The idea for it started with nuclear weapons technology, but that's where its relation to destructive power ends, said Pat Unkefer, the lab scientist who invented it.
"When I came to work at the lab, I was hired into the isotope and nuclear chemistry division," Unkefer said. "They were doing a lot of research on nitrogen, which is an explosive used in bombs, but it's also a plant nutrient. We realized there were other applications for the science and technology outside of weapons, and we started talking to agriculture researchers."
Part of the lab's mission is to ease technology transfer from weapons science into the private sector and public research.
Unkefer, a biochemist who holds a doctorate from Texas A&M University, came to Los Alamos in 1984 to help the lab turn its expertise on nitrogen isotopes into something that can encourage life, rather than destroy it.
"What we really looked at is not the nitrogen itself, but how a plant takes up nitrogen," Unkefer said. "Nitrogen is usually the growth-limiting nutrient for plants worldwide. Each plant has an internal sensing mechanism that tells it how much nitrogen it can take up, and that, in turn, regulates its growth."
Unkefer and her team discovered a way to make a compound, similar to that sensing mechanism, that tells the plant it can take more nitrogen. That lets the plant grow faster than it normally would but doesn't change anything else. It's not a genetic modification, and Take-Off is made with organic materials, she said.
"It's totally benign," said Peter Alvitre, chief operating officer of BiAgro Western, a California company that plans to market the product. "It's something very similar to what plants naturally produce on their own. It not only is benign to the environment, but I think it will have a significant environmental impact. Once we know how much nutrient each plant can take up, we can reduce the amount of nitrogen and other nutrients that farmers have to put on them."
Nitrogen and phosphorus are problematic for farmers, because excess amounts of the nutrients can leak into nearby rivers and ground water, contaminating the environment.
BiAgro Western signed a license agreement with Los Alamos on Friday to develop a commercial product. It plans to extensively test Take-Off for two years and market a product by 2007, Alvitre said.
"The reason it's going to take so long is we're going to devote a lot of time to efficacy trials and finding out how much it affects different types of crops," Alvitre said. "That way we can tell farmers exactly how much nutrient they'll need to use with the product."
He added that he hopes to work with New Mexico State University on some of the test trials.
Uses for the product span beyond farming, Unkefer said.
"It can be used to revegetate damaged lands. It can help farmers grow crops out faster, perhaps giving them time to grow more crops or water less throughout the year," she said. "We also think the faster growth will have a tendency to make plants more resistant to pests. Plants that are vigorous and healthy tend to resist pests better."
Another Los Alamos mission is to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Plants take up carbon dioxide as part of their growth process. So repairing damaged lands by using the product could also be a boon to the lab.
"Revegetation is actually a very expensive process," Unkefer said. "If you can get plants to a larger size more quickly, they'll be much heartier."
In some cases, new plants must be added to damaged lands several times because they don't grow fast and have a hard time getting their roots in deep. Take-Off could help plants grow deep roots more quickly, reducing the cost of replantings, she said.
"Most plant growth products are actually nutrients - this works entirely differently from anything else out there," Unkefer said.
"The effects we get are actually on top of those from giving plants extra nutrients. We think those aspects could really make this useful in a wide variety of areas."
Maybe thats why it sounds good
This reminds me some wild claims about human growth hormone, that more of it makes you younger and sexier and all that baloney. Now, don't you think nature would have granted us all more of that naturally if it was such a "win-win" proposition? Of course, after a while the health drawbacks of taking too much HGH became known. What surprises lurk behind artificially juicing up plant growth like this?
See post # 11
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