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Coffee Bean Gene Mapped
brian6string writes "According to this article at ABC News Online (Australia), scientists in (where else?) Brazil say they have created the first complete map of the genetic structure of the coffee plant and Brazil's Agriculture Minister says the country will now work to develop a 'super coffee.'"
Make it produce 20 times the caffiene of a normal bean. Then it can compete with brazils other export the coca plant.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
More competition for Java
They are going to use the mapped gene literally as a map. Since Brazil has banned GMO's the genome will be used as a guide for determining which cross pollinations etc. will be most effective.
So if you modify the genes by natural methods its not GM, but if you use artificial means to accomplish the exact same result, it is GM. God! I love the un-inteeligent masses that find this acceptable.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Brazil is not the only place performing these analyses... check out what they are doing in Hawaii
They MUST be infringing on SCO IP, somewhere, somewow!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This makes minimal sense to me, although it does explain why the other stories don't mention a publication. They spend two years, it's a jump of two decades, they're done but Brazilian companies can't see the data for five or six years and foreign companies will have to offer royalties? Pardon my cynicism, but what exactly do they have right now? Some shotgun coverage? ESTs?
Meanwhile, this is a few months work for any of the major genome centers. If there's really any commercial value to this, I can't imagine the coffee industry wouldn't just sponsor a publically-available ccommercial genome, like every other major agricultural crop has or will have. No one is going to wait five years and then give Brazil royalties.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Caffeine-free coffee! How dare they!?
So the map of a coffee bean. thinkgeek have already got a caffine molecule on a T-Shirt so how long till they have a genitic map of a coffee bean on a T-Shirt. You saw it here first guys, so i recon that if they do then all /.ers should get a free T!
Damingo
PAKA will take over the world one
He must be one pissed mofo to have scientists work on beans.
and I quote from beavis & butthead
"It is in these hills that Juan Valdez and his trusty goat gather coffee beans every morning."
That s not really right. On an individual scale, natural selection does not seek harmony with the environment. Natural selection seeks nothing, and tunes to nothing except the amplification of oneself. Organisms do not seek to live in harmony with the environment, they seek to exploit it the best they can. The environment (i.e., the other organisms around it) counter this by trying to exploit each other in the same manner. This is natural selection. Selective breeding accelerates this process drastically.
Where a gene may provide a benefit that will increase its frequency over a period of several thousand years under the influence of natural selection, selective breeding can do it in a century or less. Selective breeding is far from a natural process. Selective breeding acts on one species, and accelerates the selection in that species for a given trait or set if traits. The surrounding species (the environment) do not experience the same increase in rate.Remember; I am not comparing GM to natural selection, but to selective breeding.
if breeding created a more hardy competitor, don't you think nature would have created it by now over the 4.5 billion years it's been at work?
This should be fairly obvious, but it has resulted in a hardier competitor. Many, many times. That's evolution. And simply stating that something is "flat out destructive" does not make it so. I'm not saying that GM is de facto safe, just that it's not by default unsafe, either. In fact, the resarch that has been done points to "safe".
Also, I can't think of a single mechanism other than improved hardiness that would cause an organism to be destructive. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to compete with indigenous species and would be wiped out.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
I'm sorry, but the idea of a cow's teat, full of frappacino, growing out of my chest, doesn't seem like that good an idea....
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Too many errors in one post (make fewer).