All you can do with kava is wait for a mutation to happen, notice it, decide if you like the mutation and replant cuttings if you do.
It's likely that there are other ways to fiddle with the kavalactones with certain growing tricks, but I don't think it's been
studied enough...and since kava is 3-5 yr crop it makes trying this-n-that a slow process to see the outcome.
I've heard about plants grown under different wavelengths of light having different proportions of chemicals/nutrients when mature,
I'd be interested to see someone take on that project with kava plants to see how they get affected.
I'd totally be interested in GMO kava, because you could hypothetically create a robust, fast growing, high kavalactone, pest resistant strain.
But if you did create that, you would basically be the kava master and it would probably cut drastically into the kava export that helps keep many South Pacific peoples afloat.
I do believe GMO isn't much different than selective breeding, it can just take things farther and faster than selective breeding, so quickly that we might not recognize possible negative effects immediately.
In terms of animals, a dog is the product of human's selectively breeding wolves...natural selection is the much slower process that led some prehistoric Canidae to eventually being a Wolf. GMO is capable of doing stuff humans normally wouldn't be able to accomplish, like insert jellyfish DNA into a dog and make their fur glow.
Scientists have done this to rabbits, it's pretty awesome, I can't recall if it affected the health of the animal though. There was also a european country that was going to GMO the trees that line the street with jellyfish dna, to make the trees glow at night. GMO street light jellyfish trees. I like it.
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