WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — Curly wisps of cotton growing in a laboratory dish have helped prove that scientists can not only grow plants just about anywhere, but manipulate them to produce super-fibers, researchers said Tuesday.
A TEAM at the University of Texas in Austin said they had coaxed cotton seeds into directly producing cotton fiber — without going through those pesky stages of growing a bush, picking the cotton and ginning it to get the seeds out.
They say they have not put cotton gins out of business, but hope their technique can lead to genetic engineering strategies using cotton to create new kinds of fibers.
“You can actually take seeds from the cotton plant, float them on the surface of a special medium, and within 5 days the surface of the seed will sprout all these little fibers,” Malcolm Brown, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
“They also produce little structures like we never saw before in cotton,” he added.
“These particular cells growing in the liquid look a lot like cells in wood, not like cells in cotton. That means maybe we triggered some cellular mechanism to change the way cell walls are made. I am not saying we are changing cotton into wood. But we could maybe genetically engineer cotton with different properties.
Want to learn more? http://www.msnbc.com/news/459029.asp
----------------------------
Alien - Administrator / Owner
["Everything was true. God was an alien. Oz really is over the
rainbow. ...and Midian is where the monsters live." -Nightbreed]
A TEAM at the University of Texas in Austin said they had coaxed cotton seeds into directly producing cotton fiber — without going through those pesky stages of growing a bush, picking the cotton and ginning it to get the seeds out.
They say they have not put cotton gins out of business, but hope their technique can lead to genetic engineering strategies using cotton to create new kinds of fibers.
“You can actually take seeds from the cotton plant, float them on the surface of a special medium, and within 5 days the surface of the seed will sprout all these little fibers,” Malcolm Brown, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
“They also produce little structures like we never saw before in cotton,” he added.
“These particular cells growing in the liquid look a lot like cells in wood, not like cells in cotton. That means maybe we triggered some cellular mechanism to change the way cell walls are made. I am not saying we are changing cotton into wood. But we could maybe genetically engineer cotton with different properties.
Want to learn more? http://www.msnbc.com/news/459029.asp
----------------------------
Alien - Administrator / Owner
["Everything was true. God was an alien. Oz really is over the
rainbow. ...and Midian is where the monsters live." -Nightbreed]