Re: Can you grow a poisonous plant without poison?

Unfortunately this idea wouldn't work, for a couple of reasons.

Taking away the part of the plant that produces the poison would be almost impossible unless the poison was say only found in the seeds or say the leaves. But then if you were to grow the plant again without these parts the plant they wouldn't be much of a plant, and would have no chance of living.

But the ultimate reason you couldn't perform such as process is that the plant produces poison because of the genes it has in its DNA, and the only way you could remove the poison would be to take out the gene for creating poison from the entire plant. If part of the plant's genetic make-up is that all seeds will have poison created in them, then you would have to remove the actually genes that will produce the poison.

If you think about it, another example of what you would be trying to do, would be like saying if you had a person who had lost their arm in an accident and they had children, that all their children would have only one arm, and this doesn't happen because in all of use is the genes to have two arms, and we don't lose it if one is lost.

You could produce a plant with no poison if you knew which genes produced the posion and removed them, using molecular biological techniques, from a single plant seed cell. This is how they have produced tomatoes that last much longer than ordinary varieties, and how they have pesticide resistant crops. Unfortunately you won't be able to do this sort of thing yourself, but if your interested maybe this is one of area of science you should look at getting into.

Hope this answered you question, David Barker