Most of my work is with grass genomes, and it’d be great to have one (or more) non-grass monocots sequenced. Grasses have a highly derived appearance relative to other monocots, and I have some ideas about big whole-genome changes that may have been involved in that development, but it’s impossible to test them when the closest non-grass genomes we have to compare to are eudicots like arabidopsis and grape.

This article about GE and gender issues was the 1st I’d heard about GE striga resistance being conferred with a construct that contains multiple genes instead of using marker assisted breeding. If you’re only planning to make one resistant variety with MAB, it’s not a big deal – but as the article says, it’s then very difficult to get the trait into many local varieties. With GE, you can get all that and a bag of chips (i.e. biodiversity).

My very conservative dad has been sending me articles like 2010 Food Crisis for Dummies for a while now. Apparently they (American conservatives) think that the USDA has been falsifying the crop yield numbers in order to artificially inflate prices. I’ve been trying to explain to him that there are simply too many crop scientists and too many farmers who would notice if the numbers were off, so even if the USDA wanted to falsify the numbers, they couldn’t do it without being caught – but he won’t listen.