Củ khoai tây béo phì

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A team of scientists found an unusual trick for growing bigger, heartier crops: inserting a human gene related to obesity (béo phì) and fat mass into plants to supersize their harvest.

Augmenting potatoes with the human gene that encodes a fat-regulating protein called FTO, which essentially alters the genetic code to rapidly mass-produce proteins, made otherwise identical potato plants grow crops that were 50 percent larger, Smithsonian Magazine reports. By growing more food without taking up more space for agriculture, the scientists say their work could help fight global hunger (nạn đói toàn cầu) — without adding to its climate impact (tác động khí hậu).

“It [was] really a bold and bizarre idea,” University of Chicago chemist Chuan He, coauthor of a paper published in Nature Biotechnology, told Smithsonian. “To be honest, we were probably expecting some catastrophic effects.”

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