The Genome of Your Thanksgiving Supper

An anonymous reader writes "Here's a fact you can distract your family with over the Thanksgiving table: many of the major ingredients in Thanksgiving foods have had their genomes sequenced. Biomedical researchers are interested in the turkey genome due to the animal's susceptibility to cancer; botanists are studying the genome of the Chinese chestnut to search for the root of its resistance to chestnut blight; and corn — well, corn's genome is just cool."

Comments

I think you meant COPYRIGHT, not COOL.

[lunchlady55]

Corn's genome is not cool IT'S COPYRIGHT MONSANTO!
tl;dr google it...

Re:I think you meant COPYRIGHT, not COOL.

[jestill]

It is really strange that you would think that Monsanto had IP rights to the corn genome. You are quite wrong. The corn genome project was funded by public dollars.
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04614/nsf04614.pdf
You can browse the maize genome or even download the data yourself:
http://www.maizesequence.org/index.html
I have multiple copies of this data on my hard drive now.
You can also check out the Idiot's guide to corn at
http://weedtowonder.org/
Much of what we know about plant genetics and breeding is due to what we learned from corn. The corn genome is not just cool, but a fundamental model system. It provides insights into the genomes for the cereal plants that contribute most of the calories you eat every day.

Re:No, corn is not cool

[Ihmhi]

I wouldn't really call it a lie. The jury's still out on that one. Yes, I'm linking to Wikipedia. There are sources cited, look them up if you feel so inclined.

More thorough studies need to be done with larger sample sizes but from what I've read I do believe that the prevalence of HFCS over sugar in our food supply is one of the many contributing factors to our modern obesity epidemic.

Part of it is that, pound-for-pound, HFCS has a higher fructose content that normal table sugar. It's not much, but that little bit adds up. Moreover, HFCS is really, really cheap and so it's put in goddamned near everything. Remember when mum said too many sweets are bad for you? Well now everything is a damn sweet.