Popping corn, or anything else, all comes down to pressure. Pop-corn has a particularly impermeable pericarp (the corn kernel’s shell), so as it is heated, the water inside the kernel vaporizes into steam and the starch turns into something close to a liquid. Eventually the heat creates enough pressure to split the pericarp and the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘corn’
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 [...]
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 [...]
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).
Corn Smut
And no that doesn’t mean corn pornography*. Corn smut, or Ustilago maydis, is a fungus that infects corn plants. It’s an old acquantance from my days working in the field. We always used to tell the new hires that corn smut was a rare delicacy in some countries (as we’d been told ourselves), but this [...]
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?
Summary of the Coverage of the Maize Genome here at J+TGC
Summarizing a couple of Virginia Walbot’s ten reasons you should care about the maize genome Hear one of the lead authors of the maize genome paper explain how and why it was done in under four minutes. Reviewing the quality of the genome sequence itself. We can already see research made possible by the maize [...]
The Domestication of Maize
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: Clearly one [...]