Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years

It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Seeds that have just been sown will, with the right mixture of sunshine and rain, be knee-high plants by the Fourth of July and tall stalks with ears ripe for picking by late August.

Corn is much more than great summer picnic food, however. Civilization owes much to this plant, and to the early people who first cultivated it.

For most of human history, our ancestors relied entirely on hunting animals and gathering seeds, fruits, nuts, tubers and other plant parts from the wild for food. It was only about 10,000 years ago that humans in many parts of the world began raising livestock and growing food through deliberate planting. These advances provided more reliable sources of food and allowed for larger, more permanent settlements. Native Americans alone domesticated nine of the most important food crops in the world, including corn, more properly called maize (Zea mays), which now provides about 21 percent of human nutrition across the globe.

But despite its abundance and importance, the biological origin of maize has been a long-running mystery. The bright yellow, mouth-watering treat we know so well does not grow in the wild anywhere on the planet, so its ancestry was not at all obvious. Recently, however, the combined detective work of botanists, geneticists and archeologists has been able to identify the wild ancestor of maize, to pinpoint where the plant originated, and to determine when early people were cultivating it and using it in their diets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25creature.html?th&emc=th

It's just about corn planting season in my yard, now that the garlic is just about done.

to it that men haven't done over the last few thousand years. Genetic modification is the same whether the in the lab or the field.
Can we leave the pseudoscientific paranoia in other forums. This is a place FOR SCIENCE.
I really hate people who fear what they don't understand...that would be genetics in this case...:banghead:

It doesn't matter that we have 6.8 billion people on earth to feed, or that it's increasing to roughly 9 billion by 2050; we shouldn't make food using any method besides pure, natural, organic farming. And don't mind the science that shows organic is no healthier than regular food. We need a scarce and expensive food supply.

> It doesn't matter that we have 6.8 billion people on earth to feed,
> or that it's increasing to roughly 9 billion by 2050;

Rather than waste shitloads of money creating patented profit-oriented
crops, how about STOPPING the cancerous rate of growth that you seem to
view as somehow desirable?


> We need a scarce and expensive food supply.

Patented seeds that allow (even require) higher concentrations of artificial
pesticides, weedkillers & fertilisers are *such* a good idea for making
cheaper foods ... oh ... wait ...

demand to know what you're eating.

:shrug:

in the field. Educate yourself.

Recombinant DNA...Gene splicing...
None of THAT could have ever been accomplished "in the field" over the last 8000 years.

I can leave a pig and a fish together in the barn overnight, and NO pig genes are ever going to be transferred into the fish.
Nature has erected roadblocks to certain genetic combinations that the lab can overturn.
"The Lab" is capable of creating brand new invasive creations that could have NEVER occurred in nature, or through selective breeding.

If you want to pick an argument, pick it with him!

http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/Home/index.cfm

Nature has ways for transferring the pig genes to the fish. In fact, that's where science got the idea.

Furthermore, since that's a rather moot point. Since there's always random mutation going on, nature's constantly creating new genes that never existed before.

This is the science forum. Not the science illiteracy forum.

And oil naturally seeps up from the ocean floor,
so the spill in the Gulf of Mexico is no big deal.
Right?

Because you were just claiming that genes don't transfer from species to species.

If you'd like to move the goal posts, fine. Just don't pretend you didn't move them.

Nope... fish genes still can't get in there naturally.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer_in_plants

If you had looked up "horizontal gene transfer" properly, you would see that it can indeed occur naturally. Or, alternatively, if you had read this article fully and understood it, then applied a little thought, you also would have seen how it would occur naturally.

In the context of evolutionary time it is quite common.

A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health
from the International Journal of Biological Sciences

http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm


This is NOT the same process that has been used by man (and nature) for thousands (millions) of years.

influence that business has over the scientific process. Why did SCIENTISTS in Europe reject GMO foods? Because of the lack of SCIENTIFIC investigation into its safety (or lack there of). Why does the FDA not require the industry to conduct safety studies?
If you can't see the patently obvious corruptive influence of business over science, I'd suggest you seriously work on your observation skills.
Does GMO have a place? Sure. But the effects need to be OBJECTIVELY studied. The most obvious problems are related to food allergies. If you are allergic to peanuts and peanut genes are spliced into other food stuffs, how is the person with the allergy going to know? Trial and error? A deadly game for them.

How dare they fuck with the genetics of a sacred plant? And who are they to determine where it takes root and when it's picked?

Those presumptuous, gene-modding bastards!

who wrote all about the development of corn from teosinte. Burbank even made crosses (corn x teosinte) and showed fertile offspring. He wrote an entire chapter about it in one of the books published in 1912 or so.

But academia dismissed so many of Luther Burbank's discoveries and observations because he was an actual practical plant breeder.

"Another step was developing plants where the kernels remained intact on the cobs, unlike the teosinte ears, which shatter into individual kernels. Early cultivators had to notice among their stands of plants variants in which the nutritious kernels were at least partially exposed, or whose ears held together better, or that had more rows of kernels, and they had to selectively breed them."

The same kind of naturally occurring genetic variation was needed to make wheat a much more friendly crop. Natural eickhorn scatters in the same way.

However, it would have been nice for the reporter to have said if the math works out, or if anybody had bothered to check. Conceivably there's no need for the harvesters to note that some ears were intact while others--most--weren't. The seeds with the "don't scatter" gene would have constituted a disproportionately large share of the seed corn for the next year because some of the seeds inevitably would have been lost after being scattered--eaten by critters, lost in the weeds or dirt, washed away by rain. Now, unless that trait was recessive, it would have quickly dominated the harvest; if it was recessive, it would just take longer, I think. But I don't trust myself to work out how quickly that would have happened without farmers' selecting for that trait specifically or if the time difference is even significant against a 9000-year history.