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.

[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.

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?