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."

pray for a cure for caner!

[mug funky]

1. not american, don't get thanksgiving (turkey at christmas instead)
2. wtf is caner? i hope those poor turkeys are alright!

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:Turkey tumors - new delicacy?

[h4rr4r]

Have you ever kept water fowl?

They love to eat, they will fight their way to the human to be fed. The production of foie gras may not be the healthiest thing for the creature, but they are not going to be living very long anyway nor does the feeding method cause them any real harm.

Re:No, corn is not cool

[mibe]

http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/HFCS_Rats_10.pdf

Rats with 12-h access to HFCS gained significantly more body weight than animals given equal access to 10% sucrose, even though they consumed the same number of total calories, but fewer calories from HFCS than sucrose.

So there's some evidence that it's worse for you than an equivalent caloric amount of sucrose (table sugar), rather than being "all the same" as we've been hearing for quite some time. You can sort of justify these results biochemically if you like (the authors do it in their discussion), since sucrose needs one more metabolic step to be broken down than does HFCS, but there are lots of other factors I'm not entirely educated about. Anyway, read the paper. I was on the "HFCS is all good!" bandwagon until I learned a bit more, and now it looks like I was wrong.

Re:Chinese Chestnut?

[Llamalarity]

"Who eats Chinese chestnuts?" Me for one, but yes true American chestnuts are noticeably sweeter. Though sadly much smaller... You neighbor should contact the American Chestnut Foundation and see if they might want to add his trees genome to their program. Which is to produce a blight resistant 15/16 American chestnut to restore back into the eastern forests. These folks have been quietly working on this for over 25 years and are very close to achieving their primary goal.