Okay, maybe not as big as the one in the picture.
Potatoes are my favorite vegetable; you can turn them into fries, bake them for an exquisite dish or mash them and eat them as a side dish. There are endless possibilities to cook a potato and what can be better than adding human fat gene in them to make them bigger and juicier?
Scientists have been experimenting with growing larger crops and it seems like they found the perfect solution; adding the human gene related to obesity and fat mass into the plants to yield super crops. The potato plants were inserted with a fat-regulating protein called FTO which changed the genetic code into producing extra proteins which resulted in large potatoes that were almost twice the size of regular ones grown from the same plant crop. “It [was] really a bold and bizarre idea. To be honest, we were probably expecting some catastrophic effects,” said Chuan He, a chemist at University of Chicago.
The chemist further explained that since potatoes don’t have a fat-regulating protein like FTO, it was difficult to predict how the plant was going to react and they were dreading that it would result in the death of the potato plant since the FTO had no restrictions and would continue growing at an alarming rate. But their worries were resolved as they were able to grow a large, hearty potato.
If you’re dreaming of cooking that juicy potato, you might need to put those thoughts on hold for the time being as the research is still in the early stages and it would be some time before we get to see those genetically modified (if at all) potatoes hit our local grocery stores. The scientists believe that growing large-sized crops instead of more crops would save space for agriculture without affecting the climate and even help fight global hunger in the future.