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Not Genetically Engineered: Square Watermelons

Dec 28th, 2009
by James.
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Square watermelon. Photo: laughlin, flickr (click photo to see in original context)

This is an addendum to my previous post: Not Genetically Engineered: Watermelons

At the time I thought the only awesome thing about watermelons that people calling genetic engineering was seedlessness. It turns out there are also square watermelons. Are they genetically engineered? I guess my title does kind of give away the answer.

Square watermelons aren’t the product of genetic engineering, or radiation mutagenesis, nor even conventional breeding. (more…)

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Name That Plant: Nondescript Root Edition

Dec 26th, 2009
by James.
3 comments

Do you have any idea how long it’s been since we’ve had a name that plant post? The last one was almost a year ago on January 11th. So rather than let the tradition go a year untouched, this is an special edition of Name… that… Plant!

Can you name this root vegetable?

If you guess it correctly (and I’ve no idea if this one will be hard or easy but prior experience suggests someone will know within the first couple of comments, though on this other hand this isn’t a great picture) I’ll let you know as soon as I see the comment. If no one gets it by new year’s eve I’ll update again with the answer (and a better picture that gives it away).

This is what my part of California looked like on the Monday before Christmas! Glad I'm celebrating the holidays somewhere with snow.

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Merry Christmas

Dec 25th, 2009
by James.
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I hope everyone is having a great holiday (even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, if you live in the US it’s hard to get much work done today).

Right before I left town to celebrate the holidays with my folks, my zygocactus decided to flower for the first time ever*. I guess it really is a christmas cactus!

Christmas cactus in bloom!

Wishing all a safe and happy holiday!

*Well since it’s been a free living plant. As previously mentioned, the plant goes back at least four human generations propagated by cuttings.

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The Water Chestnut

Dec 12th, 2009
by James.
2 comments
Botanical illustration of Eleocharis dulcis, the Water Chestnut

Botanical illustration of Eleocharis dulcis, the Water Chestnut

The water chestnut is one of those foods I’ve eaten my whole life without knowing anything more about it than flavor and appearance (and that only because it so often shows up in frozen vegetable mixes).

The scientific name for the Water Chestnut is Eleocharis dulcis, and it’s often classified as a sedge.* It’s also a quite awesome plant. Consider:

  • The visible parts of a water chestnut plant are leafless stems that perform photosynthesis. (The water chestnut has almost completely abandoned leaves!)
  • The edible part of the plant is a botanical structure called a corm** which is a modified underground stem used by a plant to store energy (water chestnut plants are very much about stems). Not to be confused with bulbs like those of onions and garlic, which can look similar, but are instead made up mostly of leaves
  • The reason water chestnuts remain so crunchy after cooking is that their cell walls are reinforced by special phenolic compounds, the same class of molecules as capsaicin, the molecule that makes chilli peppers spicy.

The genus Eleocharis also contains species like Eleocharis vivapara which switch between C3 and C4 forms of photosynthesis depending on whether they’re grown on dry land or in swamps. The relative advantages and costs of these two different forms of photosynthesis are worth a post on their own, but I’d always assumed it was an either/or choice and didn’t realize ANY plant species could pick to use whichever system was best suited to the local environment.[citation]

Domestication: (more…)

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My Zygocactus is Getting Ready to Bloom

Dec 8th, 2009
by James.
5 comments

Some background: as an exciting and awesome plant scientist as myself might be expected to maintain a wide range of plants around the house. Instead I have exactly one*, a Christmas Cactus that’s been clonally** in my family for four generations (human generations, my Christmas Cactus is only a third generation plant).

My Christmas Cactus is not happy. At my old apartment I had it on the kitchen table, where…someone… had an accident involving it and a pressure cooker. Right after we moved I left it on a windowsill with the window open and the blinds (blowing in the wind) cut into it even more. On top of all that, the new place offers only north facing windows***.

So needless to say I wasn’t expecting so much as a single flower given everything it’s been through. Which is why I was so surprised when I went to water it and discovered…

Christmas Cactus blooming... also a sample of the less than thrilling view out my bedroom window.

Christmas Cactus blooming... also a sample of the less than thrilling view out my bedroom window.

Before I rotated the plant, those two branch tips were pressed right against the window, which makes me think something like a vernalization response (temperature dependent) is involved in signaling to a Christmas Cactus that it’s time to flower. There are buds on many of the rest of the branches, but they’re still tiny.

Thanks to Mr. Subjunctive for introducing me to the name Zygocactus, even if it was in a post about how he was giving up on the (awesome sounding) name in favor of Schlumbergera.

I also want to name-drop Liza of Good to Grow. My plan is to continue following her site and use it as inspiration to increase my plant collection so by next year my Christmas Cactus won’t be so alone.

*This is what happens when you’ve moved into a new place six times times in the past six years, plus two moves of ~1000 and ~3000 miles respectively.

**The easiest way to make new Christmas cactuses is to break off several of the segments that make up one of it’s branches, put them in water to root and then plant the new plant in soil. Since the new plant is genetically identical to the old (after all it grew from a PIECE of the old plant), in other words it’s a clone. Cloning plants is much easier than cloning animals…

***When it warms up I’m planning a commando raid to sneak the poor plant onto my roommate’s balcony for a bit more sun.

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To Accomplish the Impossible

Dec 7th, 2009
by James.
2 comments

Here’s an inspirational quote about science:

“It was believed impossible to create a blue rose, since roses lack the gene to produce the color blue. However, a Japanese company spent 14 years in research and finally succeeded in developing the world’s first blue rose. I explained to President Obama how this blue rose, which holds the meaning ‘to accomplish the impossible,’ was created and said, ‘Let us work together to accomplish the impossible.’”

-Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama as quoted here (and boy will I feel silly if the whole story is a hoax)

“To accomplish the impossible”. When it comes to assigning meanings to flowers (as well as picking life goals), I’d call that a pretty good one.

The blue rose was actually developed by an Australian company called Florigene which has been acquired by a Japanese company called Suntory. I went into more detail about Florigene’s products here.

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Edible Cottonseed

Dec 2nd, 2009
by James.
3 comments
Cotton and cotton seeds photo credit: Gonzalez's tongue, Flickr (click to see photo in it's original context)

Cotton and cotton seeds photo credit: Gonzalez's tongue, Flickr (click to see photo in it's original context)

Over 102 million bales of cotton (more than 24 million tons of cotton) were grown around the world last year. I wouldn’t surprise me to hear cotton called the single most important (and widely cultivated) food crop on the face of the planet. But does it have to be a non-food crop?

Clearly no one (nor any livestock) wants to eat the cotton fibers themselves, but they aren’t the only product of the plant. After to cotton plant flowers, the cotton fibers grow around the developing seeds. The combined mixture is harvested each year, after which the seeds are removed from the cotton fibers before the cotton is baled and sold.*

The seeds of the cotton plant are full of protein and oils and since cotton is already grown as a source of fiber (and the seeds are even harvested and sorted out of the cotton fibers already) adding them to the food supply** doesn’t require any further land to be cultivated or increased input costs. Obviously there is a catch… (more…)

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Rainbow of Carrots!

Nov 26th, 2009
by James.
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Carrots ranging from yellow to almost black:

Carrots from pale yellow to black

At least five distinct colors: yellow, light orange, orange, purple, and near black

Still missing  dark red lycopene containing carrots, but it’s a wonderful range of colors. And there’s something different about the purple and black carrots. Check it out:

Yellow, orange, and purple carrots. Chopped onions too.

Yellow, orange, and purple carrots. Chopped onions too.

Notice how the purple carrots are still white in the centers? I want to know more about why!

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The Domestication of Maize

Nov 23rd, 2009
by James.
2 comments

Twenty thousand years ago, not a single crop species existed in its current form. Almost* every bite of food you eat today is the result huge amounts of human artificial selection, both unconsciously and intentionally by farmers and plant breeders. Sometimes the obvious changes are minor, for example between wild and domesticated strawberries:

Wild strawberry (left) and domesticated strawberry (right)

Wild strawberry (left) and domesticated strawberry (right)

Clearly one of the major traits early strawberry growers selected for was bigger fruits. Which makes sense since it takes about the same amount of time an effort to pick a strawberry either way, but if you’re picking the ones on the right you’ll have more pounds of fruit picked at the end of the day.

But even in this case, the similarity in form hides major changes at the genome left. Strawberries went through two whole genome duplications during domestication (looks like it’s more complicated than I made it sound see comments), so each of the cells in the strawberries on the right contain eight copies of each chromosome, while the strawberry on the left contains the more standard two copies of each chromosome.

On the other end of the spectrum is maize. (more…)

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Transmitting DNA sequences to the stars

Nov 23rd, 2009
by James.
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It’s a gloriously non-sensical project. To mark the 35th anniversary of the Drake-Sagan transmission, a guy named Joe Davis flew down to Puerto Rico and used the Arecibo radio telescope* to transmit the genetic sequence that encodes for the protein rubisco** to three nearby stars. While covering some awesomeness (using the most powerful radio transmitter on the planet to broadcast signals into space from an iPhone), and some criticisms (what is a DNA sequence going to mean to extra terrestrial life that almost certainly won’t contain DNA and absolutely wouldn’t use the same sequences to encode for the same amino acids), the author left one key question unanswered. Which plant’s rubisco sequence was shouted out to the cosmos?

Fortunately he posted the sequence here, and using BLAST it was easy to identify the gene as belonging to Nicotiana tabacum. The tobacco plant. Seriously? The gene that encodes for the rubisco protein is one of the more widely sequenced plant genes out there, as differences in the sequence are often used to study the relatedness of different plant species. He could pick from the sequences of organisms ranging from coconut to corn, from ferns to redwoods and the most worthy plant that came to mind was tobacco?

Oh well.

*Another awesome bit of science operated by Cornell

**Rubisco is the plant protein that plants use to grab CO2 molecules out of the air to turn into sugars. Providing us with both clean air and food to eat. It’s actually not very good at its job, which is why plants have to make so much of it. So much, in fact, that it truly is the single most abundant protein on the planet.

C4 plants like corn, sorghum, and sugar cane have actually redesigned their leaves and the way they do photosynthesis to get around the failings of rubisco.

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