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

No, corn is not cool

[Grapplebeam]

Corn is probably the biggest example of bullshit monopolies in action ever. Monsanto has all the corn. All of it. And they try to get corn to be used in everything, even though it's a waste and irresponsible to have any industry depend on one crop, much less plastics and foodstuffs, which are huge industries in and of themselves. So no, corn is not awesome. Also, corn syrup is worse for you than cane sugar, but those idiotic attack ads against people that dare state that implies we're all idiots for even daring to THINK about how corn could be worse than sugar. Seriously, if you haven't seen those commercials, they go like this: Party 1: Corn syrup is bad for you! Party 2: Well how do you know that? Corn comes out of the ground, it MUST be natural! Party 1: Uh, I think I read it in a book... Party 2 then begs the question that things that come out of the ground it must be natural and therefore better, AGAIN, and then implies anyone against corn syrup is a retard. Seriously, go look it up. It's actually offensive.

Re:No, corn is not cool

[Monkeedude1212]

Corn is probably the biggest example of bullshit monopolies in action ever. Monsanto has all the corn. All of it.

That's odd. My grandparents grow corn. How does Monsanto have that corn?

Re:No, corn is not cool

[jestill]

Wow dude. You need to get on your meds. The corn genome is quite cool.

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.

Re:No, corn is not cool

[HBI]

You are being mildly inaccurate. The problem isn't with corn syrup per se, it is with high fructose corn syrup - HFCS.

Normal corn syrup is laden with dextrose - glucose. HFCS has a portion of that dextrose converted to fructose. HFCS 42 - 42% fructose - is close to table sugar/sucrose sweetness so it is frequently used. Fructose has some interesting qualities compared to glucose or dextrose:

1) It is metabolized in the liver, rather than delivered to the individual cells, unlike glucose.
2) Its fructolysis metabolic pathway ends up producing either glycogen or palmitate, ie, either 'stored energy' up to the ~ 3000 calorie limit, or fat deposits.
3) Its metabolism is not regulated by insulin, unlike glucose.

Fructose metabolism has more resemblance to the uptake of starches, rather than monosaccharide glucose. Increasing the monosaccharide fructose intake of humans was a grand experiment in making people fat, in other words.

For that matter, the reputation of Americans as flatulent could easily have something to do with fructose malabsorption, since nearly every food has free fructose in it nowadays.

That said, sucrose isn't a winner either as it is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose which is (partially) cloven apart in the stomach and then absorbed as separate monosaccharides. The glucose is fine as far as that goes, as it is insulin regulated, but the fructose within has the same problem as HFCS. For that matter, might as well call sucrose HFCS 50, with the slight caveat that a portion of the sucrose will not be metabolized, possibly reducing uptake of fructose in comparison to HFCS, which has its fructose already in monosaccharide form.

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.

[Amorymeltzer]

First of, Monsanto owns patents, not copyrights. Second of all, that makes IP law and Monsanto uncool, not corn and certainly not the corn genome.

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.