Two recent articles on Biology News Net involved research on the genome of two important types of plants, the soybean and the sunflower. Apparently the soybean is the first legume species to have a complete, published genome, and now the sunflower is being studied to have the same.
How is this relevent to economics?
Soybeans and sunflowers serve as important resources. Soybeans are not only a food and oil source, they are a possible source of energy (biodiesel) and have nitrogen fixing roots (which increases the growing ability of soil). Sunflowers are also a source of food and oil. Knowing their genetic makeup will allow scientists to grow hybrids that maximize on these aspects of each plant. That means that not only more could be provided, what was being provided would be created especially for certain purposes. The plants could be bred to resist diseases or drought, to produce nutrients more suited for the human body, and so on. Genetic alteration would allow the plants to grow in places they originally could not; for example, the article on sunflowers noted that they could be bred for subsistence agriculture in places like Africa. New types of food would be available in places that need extra resources. Economically speaking, the knowledge that the genome offers us will allow us to produce more resources and a better quality of resources, increasing the supply.
Especially important to the U.S.A. is that the knowledge of the genome will allow the biodiesel capabilities of soybeans to be more fully expolored. According to the soybean article, "while biodiesel from soybean oil represents a cleaner, renewable alternative to fossil fuels with desirable properties as a liquid transportation fuel, there simply is not enough oil produced by the plant to be a competetive gasoline on a gallons-of-fuel yield per acre." Now that the genetic makeup of the soybean is known, the plant could be altered to produce more oil and therefore become a more suitable candidate for alternative fuel. People turning to biodiesel such as this as a substitute could help drive the price of regular gasoline down.
Though resources are never as unlimited as our wants and needs, genetic research such as this will do a lot in going towards as efficient of a production of resources as possible.
A link to the article on soybeans can be found here, and to the article on sunflowers can be found here.
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I've never really thought of how biology could tie into economics but this makes sense. Through genetic sequencing we are able to increase the supply of a certain good, raising the price of the good due to the law of supply. While more is usually better, I don't know if the price increase is beneficial in the current economic state. A
ReplyDeleteI agree that we as a country need to focus on allocating and measuring our resources so that they are more efficient and less harmful to our earth, especially in terms of fuel.
ReplyDeleteI am so sold on the idea of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) when it comes to feeding the hungry. The method for which we accomplish that is more important though. I think to feed others we need to stop producing as much food in America. 2/3rds of Americans are overweight or obese--so it's not that we have a food shortage, just a horrible way of distributing food. We should specialize jobs for producing GM crops in America as well as jobs for growing them in hungry-ridden places in order to maximize the benefits of this new technology. Now that is comparitive advantage. T
I always think it's crazy how we have advanced so much that we can hybridize plants to make them how we want/need! It's a great idea to use the soybeans as sources of food, jobs and exports for impoverished countries. I still don't see how we would be able to produce enough on a regular basis to use as an alternative fuel source, but I guess that occurs in stages and you wouldn't have to rely entirely on soybeans.
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This is a really interesting connection between biology and economics. Going off of Cierra's comment about how crazy it is that we've advanced so far, I gotta say that sometimes I worry about how technologically advanced we're getting. Sometimes it seems that we're going to have to work really hard to find things that are natural anymore =\. That being said, I'm just going to write that off as a paranoia, and say that its a really good idea to explore the biodiesel capabilities of it, as well as improving the agriculture scene in 3rd world countries. A, E
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