I think that'd be unlikely - there was a massive evolutionary benefit for the plant to produce the amount of carbohydrate stores that the plant naturally makes. If it'd been more beneficial to produce more carbs, the plant would already.
I think a more likely question is what about nutrient density? Making more carbs, in a sense, is easy. Sunlight + CO2 == carbs. Nutrients are more stringently limited by the mineral properties of the soil. This just shoves into our food more calories we don't need diluting the nutrients we do.
Unless their plan is to make cheap, tasteless, vodka and sake
That's the thing that gets me about the idea that the world needs more food.
Yes, people are better off being fed rather than not in countries where food is scarce. Better yielding crops are great for this.
Should "developed" nations end up relying on rapidly growing crops that are selected for macronutrients (or perhaps just calories) at the expense of micronutrients? In my uncommon opinion, the answer is a likely no given that we generally eat way more than is necessary and at the expense of our long term health.
The only way I can see it being beneficial in places like the United States is if it allowed individuals to grow their own food faster, cheaper, and more easily. But then we will likely implement regulations to discourage people from growing their own food. But that's pure speculation.
If I had to guess I would say dramatically larger plants require dramatically more nutrition. It will probably be a net negative outside highly fertilized industrial farming scenarios, preventing it from spreading far in nature.
Weeds somehow manage to become giant and prolific in soil that wouldn't grow any food crops. I don't think we're near any limits of soil or biology with our foods.
This is exactly the kind of gene you wouldn't want to spread "horizontally" on its own, just like antibiotic resistance among bacteria.
On the other hand, it hasn't, so far. It does exist in nature, and still doesn't pop up anywhere.
Plants also haven't evolved this functionality on their own. There are evolutionary drawbacks to uncontrolled growth, and most plants have their growth "tuned" well below what would be theoretically possible given their light and nutrient conditions.
The problem is that if we introduce it, it might take a while for those evolutionary pressures to show up. Uncontrolled growth isn't an immediate pressure, it kicks in after the damage has already been done.
I predict that mRNA is going to be an obnoxious fad, where every marketer on the planet tries to leverage the concept/acronym/terminology into their product packaging (regardless of whether it's a medicine, a car part, a floor polish, ...) -- like how Blockchain became such a darling for several years.
I wouldn’t put Blockchain in the past tense here. Having recently conducted a job search in IT, the number of jobs, companies, and startups that are either completely focused on, or at least discussing blockchain is staggering. It’s in the same boat with IoT. With some job descriptions you get both! I can’t roll my eyes hard enough.
At least IoT seems to have settled a bit so that the things that are still around are often actually pretty useful. I just wish vendors would stop trying to get nontechnical customers to base business-critical systems around cloud-based services. No, your feed bin level should NOT have to get to your dashboard 1km away via a 4G connection, a SIM not under your control, and a vendor's cloud service. Install some fiber or a wireless bridge with a couple of cantennas and then if some goober dredges up an undersea cable or you forget to update your credit card and your subscription fee bounces all your cows don't all die.
Classic hype cycle. We've seen mRNA can do one thing really well, now it will be suggested to do everything. It will be a few years before we have a clear picture.
That seems unlikely to me. mRNA could be vaguely defined as a biological programming language. I don't think people like thinking about it so its poor marketing too.
I think a more likely question is what about nutrient density? Making more carbs, in a sense, is easy. Sunlight + CO2 == carbs. Nutrients are more stringently limited by the mineral properties of the soil. This just shoves into our food more calories we don't need diluting the nutrients we do.
Unless their plan is to make cheap, tasteless, vodka and sake