2023年经济学人 基因编辑产生的"音乐植物"(1)

（单词翻译）

    Gene¹-editing has created a generation of musical crops基因编辑创造了一代音乐作物

    It has been known for some time that plants can talk to one another.

    人们知道植物可以相互交谈已经有段时间了。

    Many communicate chemically, both through the air and via their roots—warning each other, for example, of the arrival of herbivorous insects in order to co-ordinate their responses to these pests.

    许多植物通过空气和树根进行化学交流——例如，相互警告食草昆虫的到来，以便协调它们对这些害虫的反应。

    Those responses are also often a form of communication, namely a further release of chemicals that recruit predators² and parasites³ of said herbivores.

    这些反应通常也是一种交流形式，即进一步释放化学物质，以“招募”这些食草昆虫的捕食者和寄生虫。

    These then solve their summoners' problems by having lunch.

    然后，它们可以帮忙解决召集生物的一顿午餐难题了。

    Plants' interactions with sound are less well understood, though it is known that flowers such as evening primroses⁴ can detect the buzzing of bees and respond by producing sweeter nectar.

    植物与声音的相互作用还不太清楚，尽管人们知道，像月见草这样的花可以探测到蜜蜂的嗡嗡声，并通过产生更甜的花蜜来回应。

    Moreover, a paper published in this week's Cell, by Lilach Hadany of Tel-Aviv University and her colleagues, describes how plants make noises when they are stressed by drought or physical damage.

    此外，特拉维夫大学的利拉赫·韩达尼和她的同事在本周的《细胞》杂志上发表了一篇论文，描述了植物在承受干旱或物理损伤的压力时是如何发出声音的。

    Dr Hadany and her team do not yet know whether other plants are listening, but suspect that they might be.

    韩达尼博士和她的团队还不知道其他植物是否在倾听，但怀疑它们可能会倾听。

    None of this is news, however, to Paolo Fril, CEO and chief scientist of the Gene Duplication Corporation (GeneDupe), a biotechnology firm in San Melito, California.

    然而，对于基因复制公司的首席执行官兼首席科学家保罗·弗里尔来说，这些都不是新闻，这家生物技术公司位于加州圣梅利托。

    Observing that gardeners and greenhouse owners, from Britain's new king, Charles III, downwards⁵, often talk to their charges, and sometimes even play them music, he and his team have been investigating plants' aural⁶ and oral activities for several years, and are now tweaking them using crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technology.

    他观察到，英国新国王查尔斯三世的园丁和温室所有者经常与他们的种植物交谈，有时甚至给它们播放音乐，他和他的团队几年来一直在研究植物的听觉和口头活动，现在正在使用crispr-Cas9基因编辑技术对它们进行调整。

    The plan is to create a range of products which Dr Fril hopes will please his firm's shareholders—which he needs to do after an awkward run-in the company had a few years ago with some animal-rights activists⁷ over its previous product, Print-a-pet.

    该计划是创造一系列的产品，弗里尔博士希望这些产品能取悦他公司的股东——在几年前该公司与一些动物权利保护者就其之前的产品“宠物打印”发生了尴尬的冲突之后，他需要这样做。

    Fortunately for Dr Fril, the plant-welfare lobby is not nearly as large and noisy as its animal counterpart.

    对弗里尔博士来说，幸运的是，植物权利游说团体远没有动物团体那么大，那么吵。

    The obvious place for this new endeavour to start was with the ears of cereal crops.

    这项新的尝试显然要从谷物的“耳朵”开始。

    Though not ears in the conventional sense of the word, GeneDupe's biotechnologists realised that they could be turned into such.

    虽然不是传统意义上的耳朵，但基因复制公司的生物技术专家意识到它们可以变成“耳朵”。

    Each of the spikes⁹ attached to the seeds in an ear of barley¹⁰, wheat or rye has a resonant¹¹ frequency that depends, like the note plucked from a harp¹² string, on its length.

    在大麦、小麦或黑麦的穗中，每一个附着在种子上的穗状物都有一个共振频率，就像从竖琴弦上拨动的音符一样，取决于它的长度。

    If those lengths can be varied¹³ precisely¹⁴ from seed to seed by appropriate gene editing, such an “ear” can be made into a real ear, with every spike⁸ responding to its own, unique, resonant frequency in a manner similar to the hair cells in the mammalian version of that organ.

    如果可以通过适当的基因编辑准确地改变种子与种子之间的长度，这样的“耳朵”就可以被变成真正的耳朵，每一个穗状物都可以对自己独特的共振频率做出反应，就像哺乳动物的毛发细胞一样。