Question: How can you make plants that have more nutrience in them?

Emma Bennett answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Michael is right, one way to make plants that contain more nutrients is to supply them with more nutrients in the first place – and MiracleGro is great for this. This is why farmers often add fertilisers to the ground when growing crops and I always have to do soil tests before starting field trials to know exactly what nutrients need to be added. Alternatively finding plants with a bigger root system often means that they will be able to take up more of the available nutrients.

Another way to solve the problem is by genetically modifying the plants. Currently these can’t be sold in the EU but they can in North America. although a lot of this work is just scientists playing around in labs and hasn’t been put into commercial crops so you don’t have to worry about eating all sorts of weird and wonderful mutants. For example some people work on trying to delay the time it takes for leaves to turn yellow and drop off, this way they should be able to photosynthesis for longer and make more sugars and carbohydrates that can be put into the seeds.

If you just want to get more nutrients into the seeds then you can look at the nutrient transporters in the plant to try and make these work better or reduce the total number of seeds per plant. That way more nutrients are available to the fewer remaining seeds.

As you can hopefully see there are lots of ways of trying and get more nutrients into plants and scientists are still coming up with new ideas all the time. So if you have any of your own ideas then I’d love to hear them.