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 [...]
Posts under ‘Plants’
We got to genetics in class today and the story of the shrunken 2 gene
The origin story of shrunken2, the gene behind much of the sweet corn we eat today. Pictures of the phenotype of CAL mutants in arabidopsis (the gene I mentioned last week for its role in differentiating between broccoli and cauliflower).
A new plant (in the apartment, not the world)
I have a second houseplant! I was just excited and needed to share with the world. Check the post for pictures.
“New” Cruciferous Vegetables
A remarkable number of vegetables are actually produced by a handful of brassica species (called cruciferous vegetables), as covered by Greg over at Pie-ence. The wonderful thing about having so many different kinds of vegetables within a single, inter-fertile species is that the Brassicas are a constant source of “new” vegetables. Highlights of this post include: The CAL gene and its role in differentiating cauliflower from broccoli, reminiscing about broccoflower, and the “flower sprout” the newest breed of cruciferous vegetable.
Strawberry Genome Sequenced (Correction included)
After already needing to correct this post, I must now invalidate the whole thing. Seems I’ve been taken in by a premature press release that was turned into reliable sounding articles on news sites and was then picked up by blogs like mine that took the those sites to be credible sources. It’s a big [...]
Pumpernickel and Rye and Vavilovian Mimicry
Pumpernickel bread originally comes from a way of preparing rye bread with long cooking times (up to 24 hours) at low temperatures. What a wonderful opportunity to talk about rye, a crop whose domestication was likely a consequence of vavilovian mimicry (weeds adapting to look and grow more like crop plants).
Biodiversity and Genetic Engineering Aren’t Mutually Exclusive!
The work of plant breeders and the naturalists who catalog so much of the genetic diversity passed down over 400 generations*, have done far more to feed people than genetic engineering thus far. The reason I spend so much time talking about genetic engineering (and to a lesser extent mutation breeding) isn’t because I think [...]
Why I’m so Excited About the Banana Genome
It looks like this time the banana genome really will be sequenced! The justification for sequencing is the combination of the vital importance of bananas as a source of food in the tropics and their lack of crop breeds since most bananas are sterile and only propagated vegetatively. Banana will be the first non-grass monocot sequenced, which is also awesome for me as a grass genomicist because the genome of the banana will be the new window into what the genome of the ancestor of all grasses might have looked like! But click through to read more!