Oh Cursed Weed

Oh cursed weed, why doest thou so plague me? Even though I’m not trying to upstage Shakespeare, I did write that. Clever, huh? But that is how a lot of people feel about weeds. Now let’s get specific and begin with the old adage, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Prickly lettuce, a common weed that has long vexed farmers, has potential as a new cash crop providing raw material for rubber production, according to Washington State University scientists.

 

Writing in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, they describe regions in the plant’s genetic code linked to rubber production. The findings open the way for breeding for desired traits and developing a new crop source for rubber in the Pacific Northwest.

Here’s Ian Burke, a weed scientist at WSU and a study author: “I think there’s interest in developing a temperate-climate source of natural rubber. It would be really great if prickly lettuce could become one of those crops.”

 

In prickly lettuce, the wild relative and ancestor of cultivated lettuce, a milky white sap bleeds from the stem and this same substance could prove to be an economically viable source of natural rubber and help alleviate a worldwide threat to rubber production.