I’m just about wrapped up with the big project I’ve been working on recently. Hope to be able to say more about it in the not-too-distant future. Having to be secretive in science sucks. But there’s a lot of be happy about! I’m done teaching for a long time. As much as I enjoyed working [...]
Posts under ‘Genetics’
Where the superpowers of superweeds come from
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 [...]
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 [...]
Helitron Capture Creating New Genes?
One of the things that has made annotating genes in the maize genome so difficult (there are currently two sets of gene models one with only 32,000 genes, which is low estimate, and the other with 100,000 is far too many) is the presence of large numbers of gene fragments that have been captured and [...]
Missing Genes on a Massive Scale
Edit: stripped out all the numbers as they clearly applied to an earlier version of the data and I don’t know if the new ones are intended for public release yet. Last november when the maize genome was published, one of the companion papers looked at genes where a different number of copies were found [...]
Abnormal Chromosome 10
There is a piece of DNA that is sometimes found on the end of the tenth maize chromosome. In plants that possess this extra chromosome segment, chromosome knobs* (including one that’s a part of the extra segment included in abnormal chromosome 10) start to act like centromeres**. But this story graduates from odd to downright [...]
Wow!
Who could have predicted maize geneticists would be so interested in maize genes? The entry I posted last night on Purple plant1 and Colored aleurone1 easily received more traffic in its first day on the site (it’s still got a long way to go before it catches long term readership attractors like water chestnuts and [...]
Two classical maize genes, synteny, and the mystery of the missing gene
Colored aleurone1 and Purple plant1 are both genes with long histories in maize research and are involved in the regulation of anthocyanin biosynthesis. The mutant version of purple plant1 does exactly what it sounds like. (In the proper genetic background) it has plants producing anthocyanin (a purple plant pigment) everywhere, resulting in purple plants. The mutant form of colored aleurone1 was identified from a mutant that changed the color of individual corn kernels. The two genes are also duplicates (homeologs) resulting from the maize whole genome duplication. More details, pictures of the mutant plants, a quick and interesting syntenic analysis and the mystery of the missing gene, in the full post.
Oliva Judson’s Salute to Grasses
Talking up Olivia Judson (an English evolutionary biologist who has the trick of getting the general public excited about biology), her post on why grasses are so important in particular, and, for some reason bird’s teeth (they wanted to slip in somewhere).
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).