Biotechnology
生物技术
Roses are blue, violets are red
玫瑰是蓝色的，紫罗兰是红色的 （陈继龙 编译）
Feb 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition
If you don't like GM food, try flowers instead
要是不喜欢转基因食品，试试转基因花
（1） BEAUTIFUL flowers—like beautiful women—can separate the most sensible of men from their money. Those men invest in the reproductive organs of plants such as roses to signal, albeit coyly, analogous intentions of their own.
美丽的花朵就像美女一样，会让极为感性的男人倾其所有。那些男人用买来的玫瑰（或者其它）花蕊（花的“生殖器官”），去表白自己希望共结连理的心愿——虽然有点害羞。
The result is a cut-flower industry in which roses alone are worth $10 billion a year. But that is peanuts compared with what happened in the past. In 17th century Holland, tulips (the fashionable flower du jour) GREw so expensive that people exchanged them for houses. One bulb of the most sought-after variety, the flaming red-striped Semper Augustus, sold for twice the yearly income of a rich merchant.
切花（cut-flower）产业就这样形成了，每年仅玫瑰一种花即可创造100亿美元的价值，不过相比从前这只能算是蝇头小利。在17世纪的荷兰，风行一时的郁金香身价倍增，以至于人们不惜变卖房产来换取郁金香。带有火红条纹的“永远的奥古斯都”（Semper Augustus）是最受欢迎的一种，它的一块球茎售价相当于一个富商年收入的两倍。
For modern flower growers, the equivalent of the Semper Augustus is the blue rose, which horticulturalists have longed for since the Victorian period. Any blue rose sent on St Valentine's day this year will have been dyed. But if Yoshi Tanaka, a researcher at Suntory, a Japanese drinks company, has his way, that will soon change. Dr Tanaka is currently overseeing the first field trials of a blue rose developed by Suntory's subsidiary, Florigene. （2） If the trials are successful, a dozen blue roses—even if they do look slightly mauve[1]—could, by 2010, be what separates an unsuccessful suitor from Prince Charming.
在现代花卉栽培者看来，堪与“永远的奥古斯都”相提并论的唯有蓝色玫瑰。自维多利亚时代以来，园艺家就一直渴望培育出这种玫瑰。今年情人节送出的所有蓝色玫瑰还将是染成的，但如果日本三得利（Suntory）饮品公司专家田中良（Yoshi Tanaka）能够如愿以偿，情况就会很快得到改变。三得利的子公司Florigene培育的一种蓝色玫瑰已经开始了首次野外栽培试验，田中博士目前正在对试验进行密切观察。一旦试验成功，那么到2010年的时候，12朵蓝色玫瑰——即使稍带紫色——能够让求婚的小伙子“抱得美人归”。
Flaming tulips. Blue roses. What Dutch growers of old and Dr Tanaka's employers both grasped is that rarity, and hence economic value, can be created by genetic manipulation.
火红的郁金香，蓝色的玫瑰。荷兰老一代花卉栽培者和田中博士的老板都明白，物以稀为贵，而“稀”则可来自基因调控。
The stripes of the Semper Augustus were caused by the genes of a virus. Not knowing that an infection was involved, the Dutch growers were puzzled why the Semper Augustus would not breed true. The genetics of blue roses, too, have turned out to be more complicated than expected. （3）The relevant genes cannot easily be pasted into rose DNA because the metabolic pathway for creating blue pigment in a rose consists of more chemical steps than it does in other types of flower. (Florigene has sold bluish genetically modified carnations since 1998.) Success, then, has been a matter of pinning down the genes that allow those extra steps to happen, and then transplanting them to their new host.
“永远的奥古斯都”上的条纹是由一种病毒基因造成的。荷兰的花卉栽培者过去并不知道这与病毒感染有关，所以就搞不懂为什么“永远的奥古斯都”不易培育。蓝色玫瑰的基因原理也比预想的更为复杂。由于在玫瑰中合成蓝色素的代谢过程所涉及的化学反应步骤较其他品种的花多，因此各种相关基因不易插入玫瑰DNA。（从1998年开始Florigene的经基因修饰而成的蓝色康乃馨就已上市。）故而成功的关键就在于，必须抑制那些引发干扰反应的基因，然后再把它们移入新的宿主。
Buy any other name
色香俱全方为花
Mere colour, however, is for unsophisticated[2] lovers. A truly harmonious Valentine gift should smell beautiful as well. Sadly, commercial varieties of cut rose lack fragrance. （4）This is because there is a trade-off between the energy that plants spend on making the complex, volatile chemicals that attract women and insects alike, and that available for making and maintaining pretty-coloured petals. So, by artificially selecting big, long-lasting flowers, breeders have all but erased another desirable characteristic.
然而，颜色之美只能取悦那些初涉尘世的恋人。作为情人节礼物，蓝色的玫瑰再加上迷人的香气，才更为协调。可惜，市售的切花玫瑰都缺少芳香。这是因为，植物合成挥发性复合物（这种复合物对女人和虫子有着同样的吸引力），与形成颜色迷人的花瓣并为之提供养料，两者所耗能量存有一种平衡关系。因此，人工培育时如果注重花瓣大、花期长，就必须“牺牲”人人心仪的芳香。
Smell is tougher to implant than colour because it not only matters whether a plant can make odoriferous chemicals, it also matters what it does with them. This was made plain by the first experiment designed to fix the problem. In 2001 Joost Lücker, then a researcher at Plant Research International in Wageningen, in the Netherlands, added genes for a new scent into petunias. Chemical analysis showed that the new scent was, indeed, being made, but unfortunately the flowers did not smell any different. As happens in Florigene's blue carnations and roses, Dr Lücker's petunias dumped the foreign chemical they were being forced to create into cellular waste buckets known as vacuoles. （5）Whereas pigments are able to alter a petal's colour even when they are inside a vacuole, because the cell contents surrounding the vacuole are transparent, smelly molecules must find a route to the sniffer's nose by getting out of the cell and evaporating.
在花中加入香味要比加入颜色难，因为前者涉及植物能否合成有味化学物质以及如何处理这些化学物质。第一个设计用于解决该难题的试验充分证明了这一点。2001年，时任荷兰瓦赫宁根（Wageningen）国际植物研究所研究员的朱斯特•吕克尔（Joost Lücker）在矮牵牛中插入了一种新型香味基因。化学分析发现了合成的新型香气物质，但可惜花的气味没有任何变化。跟Florigene培育的康乃馨和玫瑰所遇到的情况一样，吕克尔博士的矮牵牛细胞液泡中被动产生的外来化学物质被当作废物给排泄了。色素即便是位于液泡中，它也能改变花瓣的颜色，这是因为液泡外包绕的细胞内容物是透明的，而气味分子必须穿过细胞并挥发才能为闻者所闻。
Like Dr Lücker, Natalia Dudareva, of Purdue University, in Indiana, eschews[3] experiments with roses, since these plants have scents composed of 300 to 400 different molecules. She prefers to understand basic odour science using petunias and snap-dragons, which have about ten smelly chemicals apiece. She has made an encouraging discovery. By studying the many different pathways through which flowers make their fragrances, she has found consistent patterns in the way these pathways are regulated.
印第安纳州普渡大学（Purdue University）的娜塔丽娅•都达瑞娃（Natalia Dudareva）跟吕克尔博士一样，也没有用玫瑰做试验，因为这类植物的气味分子组成多达300到400种。她选择矮牵牛和金鱼草作为基础气味科学的研究对象，这两种植物每种只有10个左右的气味分子。结果令人鼓舞——她通过研究花形成香气的多个不同途径发现，这些途径都共用同一调控模式。
Such co-ordinated patterns suggest that a type of protein called a transcription factor is involved. Transcription factors switch genes on and off in groups. （6）If Dr Dudareva is right, cut roses have lost their fragrances not because the genes that encode their hundreds of scent molecules have each lost their function, but because the plants no longer make a few transcription factors needed to turn the whole system on.
试验表明，这一共用调控模式与一种名为转录因子的蛋白有关。转录因子相当于基因的“开关”。都达瑞娃博士认为，切花玫瑰之所以失去芳香，并非因为香气分子的所有编码基因功能均失活，而是因为在这些切花玫瑰中，几个启动基因转录系统所必须的转录因子停止了合成。
This suggests that the task of replacing lost fragrance is more manageable than it seemed at first blush[4]. But even when the transcription factors in question have been identified, the problem of the energetic trade-off with pigment production and longevity will remain. So Dr Dudareva is also measuring how quickly the enzymes in scent-production pathways work, in order to identify bottlenecks and thus places where her metabolic-engineering efforts would best be concentrated.
这表明，还原失去的芳香其实并不难。但是即使能鉴定出有关转录因子，与色素形成及寿命之间的能量平衡问题仍不可避免。因此，都达瑞娃博士对气味形成过程中酶催化速度也进行了检测，以期解开制约花香形成的“瓶颈”，进而弄清在哪个位置运用代谢工程技术最为有效。
Dr Dudareva's methods may also help to improve the job that flower-scents originally evolved to do—attracting insects that will carry pollen from flower to flower. （7）By modifying the smell of crops such as vanilla, which have specific pollinator species, different insects might be attracted. That could expand the range in which such crops could be grown and thus make some poor farmers richer. A change, then, from making rich but romantic men poorer.
都达瑞娃博士的方法还可能有助于改善花香物质的后期作用（即吸引传播花粉的昆虫）。香草等农作物具有特定的传粉昆虫，但对其香味进行修饰后，可吸引不同的昆虫。这样一来，就可以扩大这类农作物的种植面积，从而提高贫苦农民的收入。因为这一改变，农民致富了，浪漫的男士却要“破财”了。
[QUIZ]
英译汉（将划线部分英文翻译成中文）：
[NOTES](OXFORD)
1. mauve adj. (of a) pale purple colour 淡紫色（的）.
2. unsophisticated adj. (sometimes derog 有时作贬义) 1 simple and natural 简单而自然的: unsophisticated tastes, attitudes, looks 简单的爱好、憨直的态度、自然的神情 * To the unsophisticated(ie naive) mind of the average viewer... 对于一般观众的单纯心理.... 2 not complex or refined; basic 不复杂的; 不精细的; 基本的: unsophisticated tools, methods, designs 简单的工具、方法、设计.
3. eschew v. [Tn] (fml 文) keep away from (sth); abstain from; avoid 避开（某事物）; 戒除; 回避: eschew political discussion 回避政治讨论.
4. at first blush literary when first thought of or considered// --At first blush, this sounds like good news.
