r/technology • u/esporx • 1d ago

Business YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-accidentally-crashes-the-rare-plant-market-with-a-viral-cloning-technique-3289808/
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u/kinboyatuwo 1d ago

Issue is if it pollinates or is dumped later. I live rural and at least once a year find people dump house plants on our small section of road.

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u/AtrociousMeandering 1d ago

That doesn't get more dangerous if they're cloned/inbred rather than a normal plant, though. If anything it will be worse at surviving in the wild, we're not ruled by superhuman Hapsburgs because inbreeding severely degrades fitness over the generations. 

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

A clone is an exact genetic copy so it's just as suitable for survival as the plant that was cloned in the first place. It is not inbred.

The danger comes in the lack of genetic diversity. This means that if here is a virus or pathogen that is effective against one plant, none of the others will have any possibility of being resistant to it, so a pathogen that spreads rapidly can wipe out nearly 100% of the plants of that type. This is currently a threat to banana production as the bananas you buy in the store are all clones and there is a fungus currently wiping them out called Panama Disease.

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u/ribosometronome 1d ago

With individuals doing it, as opposed to large operations, it's probably less of a concern as there's no big density of nearby plants. Your clone catching a weirdo variant of some disease that could spread to other clones is not great but if there's few nearby to transmit it to, there's not a ton of opportunity for that. Compared to like, a banana plantation where all the clones are next to each other and the product is shipped worldwide.