Superman had the yellow sun of earth, spiderman had a radioactive spider-bite, but what about superweeds, where does their super power (surviving application of Round-up/glyphosate) come from? To understand how superweeds survive, we first have to understand why normal weeds (the Jimmy Olsens and Lois Lanes of the plant world) die. <– last superhero reference [...]
Posts under ‘agriculture’
Don’t judge the genetic diversity of a species by its cover
There are more differences in the genomes of two unrelated corn plants than between the genomes of a human and a chimpanzee (two species separated by 3.5 million years of evolution). On the other hand, two unrelated human beings, members of the same species, have more than four times as many genetic differences as two [...]
BBC on drought tolerant maize/corn
There’s a new episode of BBC’s Discovery: Feeling the World out this morning. It’s only 26 minutes long, and the full piece is definitely worth a listen, but if you don’t have 26 minutes, the meat of the post can be summarized in 8 minutes: 3:20-7:54: Introducing the subject, developing drought tolerant varieties of maize [...]
The Most Studied Genes of Maize (and why we love kernel phenotypes)
Of the fifteen most studied genes in maize (cool graphical table included), thirteen can have kernel phenotypes when mutated. Why? Because of what a geneticist can tell from looking at a single ear of corn that shows such a mutant phenotype (details inside).
The Color of Corn and Cultural Values
Last week posts and The Scientist Gardener and The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog discussed the African preference for white over yellow corn and some of the reasons behind it. Would orange corn, packed full of even more of the healthy vitamin A precursors that give yellow corn its color, be rejected for the same reasons?
India and Bt Brinjal/Eggplant
India decided to delay the approval of insect resistant eggplants, links to various coverage, and how much difference a comma makes.
The Taste of Tomatoes + Tomato Mutagenesis
First, since I didn’t explicitly state it in my previous post, the paper on the longer lasting tomatoes developed by India’s National Institute for Plant Genome Research didn’t report any data on how the RNAi knock-down tomatoes actually taste.* The tomatoes are nearly twice as firm as tomatoes in which these genes are NOT knocked [...]
Scientists at India’s NIPGR Create a Longer-Lasting Tomato (Studying The Regulation of Fruit Ripening)
Author’s note: This would seem to be the week for vegetables I hated as a kid. Yesterday was onion, today tomato, if there’s a story about brinjal/eggplant in the next few days we’ll have hit all the big ones. I was recently pointed to an early publication paper that went up on the Proceedings of [...]
Turkey Domestication
A new paper in PNAS finds evidence of another breed of, now lost, domesticated turkeys. Some description, speculation, and links to the paper itself and further coverage in wired.
An Interview with Roger Beachy
Pam Ronald, writing at Tomorrow’s Table points out an interesting interview with Roger Beachy the new head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (itself a newly created government organization) in Nature Biotechnology. He talks about everything from restoring support for the, very successful, programs that used to fund the training of plant breeders [...]