Biotechnology

May 1, 2007May 1, 2007

Pinchbeck potatoes

Here we go again. Potatoes, naturally low in carotenoids, the precursors of vitamin A, have been genetically engineered to make them richer, to the point where 250 grams of fresh potatoes might supply half the recommended daily allowance.

Pinchbeck is a “cheap or tawdry” imitation of gold.

April 28, 2007April 28, 2007

Dogs That Changed The World

That’s the title of a new two-part documentary on PBS. The associated website has all sorts of interesting stuff, including an interview with a geneticist looking at the relationships among the world’s 400 or so breeds. There’s a podcast.

April 26, 2007April 26, 2007

Controlling self-pollination

Not a day passes, it seems, without news of yet another important gene being identified and mapped. Not long after geneticists uncovered the trigger for flowering, we now have news that researchers at Cornell are close to tracking down the genes that regulate a plant’s ability to self-pollinate. Good news for breeders everywhere.

April 21, 2007

Flowering trigger uncovered

Some clever genetic manipulation has led scientists to identify the chemical that allows daylength to trigger flowering in plants – all plants, it looks like. It is the protein produced by the gene called Flowering Locus T, or FT. This means that crop beeders will now have a better shot at developing varieties which will flower at different latitudes, useful as climate zones shift due to climate change.

April 15, 2007April 15, 2008

Chinese fungi and tea

I’m killing a few hours at Hong Kong International Airport, so I pick up the latest issue of China Today. There’s a number of really interesting articles, but two little snippets jumped out at me. The first is a short note on the Chinese Caterpillar Fungus, Cordyceps sinensis. No, I’d never heard of it either, but it turns out that it is important in Chinese traditional medicine, and that it has not been possible to grow it in the lab. Until just now that is, hence the note in the Sci-tech Info section announcing the possibility of mass-production.

The other really nifty piece of sino-information occurs in the opening section of an Around China piece on the Zhenyuan Yi-Hani-Lanu Autonomous County. It seems that this ancient tea-growing area, with its tea-dominated forests, boasts what is considered the oldest and largest tea plant in the world. At 25 metres tall, almost 3 metres in diameter and an alleged 2,700 years of age, it is apparently quite the tourist attraction, and “its fleshy, glossy leaves produce a strong and lasting flavour.”