"P van Rijckevorsel" wrote in message
...
Fred writes
Instead of no-freeze tomatoes or disease-resistant crops we'd have
crops
which grow in a quarter the time or yield many times the usual amounts
in
the same cultivated acreage and with no additional nitrogen required
and
no
danger of cross-species gene or resistance transfer.

Stewart Robert Hinsley schreef
If a plant grows twice as fast, it'll need twice as much nitrogen.
Several essential classes of biochemicals contain nitrogen, including
proteins and nucleic acids.

+ + +
One tomato will require a fixed amount of nitrogen, irrespective of the
speed at which it grows. If a plant produces two tomatos where before it
produced only one it will require more nitrogen.
For many plants the limiting factor is water. If photosynthesis is twice
as
efficient, likely a plant will grow twice as fast.

The way technology develops it may prove to be easier to adjust the output
of the sun to give more light of the right wavelengths, so as to have
plants
growing more quickly? The sun is just a big nuclear fusion reactor: it may
well be more susceptible to fiddling than the process of photosynthesis.
(Of
course, if this goes wrong and the sun should explode even a little bit
the
present worries on global warming will seem irrelevant)
PvR




Thank you for the replies to date to my enquiry.
Next question; are there any aquatic plants (seaweeds) growing in the Dead
Sea, or is the salt concentration too high for them?
Thanks
Fred.