Keith Robinson writing over at Omics! Omics! posted Celebrating Citrus where he catelogs some of the diversity available to him from local grocery stores before pointing out a citrus review article that suggests all that diversity can be traced back to only three wild species and wraps it up by pointing out the project to sequence the sweet orange genome.

Imagine if you could have a whole series of clementine-like fruits, with the size & easy peeling characteristics but with the whole range of other citrus flavors and colors genetically grafted in — cara cara clementines and blood clementines and ruby red clementines and perhaps even sweet lemontines and key clemenlimes.

Highly recommended.

The Biogeography of Darwin’s Gourd is a post I discovered through research blogging (speaking of which I should really write another entry that meets their standards some day). The gourd of the title is Sicyos villosus, a cucurbit (the group of plants that includes squashes, melons, and pumpkins) collected by Darwin from one of the islands in the Galapagos the better part of two centuries ago … and never again recorded by science. At this point the dried sample collected by Darwin may be the only existence the species ever lived:

The analysis of the cucurbit’s DNA, extracted from the seed samples taken by Darwin, revealed that S. villosus is closest in relation to cucurbits in North America and Mexico. The species probably diverged roughly 4 mya, when the Galapagos were still geologically young. Dispersal was not human in origin, meaning long distance from the mainland, potentially from its spiny fruits stuck to birds, the authors suggest.

How cool is it that we can learn so much from a single sample of a species that has otherwise vanished from the earth?

Finally, by way of DailyKos, comes a pointer to this valentine’s day themed article, clearly written for the non-scientist, where a summary written by me seems superfluous given the title: Sex, Drugs, and Paleo-botany! And yes, the exclamation point is in the original title as well.

Corngrass1 a dominant mutant that keeps maize from making the transition to adult growth. The stalk of a normal maize plant is shown to the left for comparison. According to George Chuck, in some genetic backgrounds where they never flower, corngrass plants are potentially immortal, as cuttings of the stalk can be transplanted to new soil and simply continue to grow. (Normally corn plants are annuals, they stop growing once the end of their stalk turns into a tassel and eventually die off even if they're grown in temp. controlled greenhouses.) Photo courtesy of MaizeGDB.org

Just got back from a great talk given by George Chuck, who works on microRNAs that control the transitions between the juvinile and adult phases of plant development in maize at the USDA’s Plant Gene Expression Center. In trying to figure out why it was such a great talks (besides the obvious, that he had exciting data to present).

The obvious ones I could spot where:

• History. One of the mutants he was working on, corngrass1, was first discovered in a sweetcorn field before many in the audience had even been born, and he was able to tie the history of the mutant in with the history of the debate about corn’s relationship to teosinte the wild grass from which we now know corn was domesticated.
• Context. Starting out by discussing phase change in model organisms like C. elegans, as well as phase change in humans (more commonly known as puberty) before bringing it back to corn.
• Tiny unexpected things. The one datapoint he presented to suggest the system he’d found in corn might also be functioning in eudicts wasn’t the usual model system for eudicts (Arabidopsis thaliana, the first plant to have its genome sequenced). It was watermelon. “I’ve always wanted a reason to work with watermelons.” It was only the second time I’ve seen any biologic data on watermelons. (The first was the result of a fascinating discussion with my roommate about phloem loading in the cucurbits (a group of species that includes melons, squash, pumpkins and cucumbers).)
• I’m sure there were lots of other things I didn’t even notice. Like housekeeping, it’s what’s left undone or done badly is much easier to notice than what is taken care of perfectly. <– I don’t know how the analogy to housekeeping entered my vocabulary, sounds more like something a person who was alive for the 1950s would use.

Studying plant genetics (and probably a lot of other scientific fields as well) means seeing a lot of presentations that are difficult to follow, even though they’re presenting fascinating data, but it also means seeing the occasion speaker who has mastered both the concepts and methods of his or her field as well the techniques used hook an audience.

This isn’t true just of public speaking. I’ve heard people complain (though I haven’t formed an opinion of my own on the subject), that the papers that get published in Science and Nature, the two most prestigious scientific journals out there, don’t always represent the biggest scientific breakthroughs, but rather great science that’s been done by people who are the best at writing papers accessible and interesting to people not working in the exact same field as the authors. I’m still too unexperienced as a scientist to know if this is a real bias, or just represents bitterness by people whose papers don’t get accepted, but you can see how it would make sense if it were true, can’t you?

Science and Nature are both read by highly educated scientists across a wide range of disciplines. If you and I both make discoveries of equal scientific merit, but my paper is written up in such a way that NO one outside of plant science will be able to make heads or tails of it, and yours has a chance of being read and understood by people working in everything from the phylogenetics of archaea to human medicine, and maybe even get a few anthropologists interested enough to skim the figures, obviously your paper should have a higher priority for being published in journals that reach the widest audiences (like Science and Nature).

It really isn’t fair, but people who can do the research, and then turn around and effectively communicate their results clearly do have an advantage in science. That’s why I’m trying to make notes of what keeps me engaged during the best talks. My one attempt so far to present the results of my own research was an only slightly mitigated disaster.

As just for the record, unless you’ve already decided you want a 100% teaching position, great communication skills are NOT a substitute for actually producing interesting data. They’re complementary goods, not substitutes.