Ricki Lewis

As autumn looms, we're enjoying the last bites of sweet, juicy watermelon.

 

Conventional agriculture has molded our fruits and veggies to suit our palates, gradually crafting domesticated Citrullus lanatus from three ancestral melon species. But the process may have also removed valuable traits.

 

Researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York, have analyzed genomes of watermelon and its ancestors, revealing traits that early breeders may have inadvertently removed in their quest to maximize the red, sweet, watery flesh of the fruit. Their report appears in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

 

To continue reading, go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.

"Pan" has several meanings.

 

As a noun, it refers to "a round metal container that often has a long handle and a lid."

 

As a verb, it means criticism, like panning a film.

 

Peter Pan refers to an adult who doesn't want to behave like one, from Sir James Barrie's play about the boy who didn't want to grow up

 

As a prefix, "pan," from the Greek, means "all, every, whole, and all-inclusive."

 

Sigmund Freud reportedly used the term pan-sexualism in 1914, to mean "sex as a motivator of all things."

 

In genetics, the human pangenome is a complete reference of human genome diversity. It is envisioned as a new type of map that represents all of the ways that the sequence of 3,054,832 billion DNA base pairs – the building blocks of a genome – vary, plus or minus a few from short repeated sequences. The depiction is so densely packed that it resembles a map of the New York City subway system.

 

The Human Pangenome Reference Consortium is spearheading creation of a "genome reference representation that can capture all human genome variation and support research on the full diversity of populations."

 

 

To continue reading, go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.