assortment of 11,400-year-old figs found in Israel may be the fruit of the world's earliest form of agriculture, researchers say.
Posted on 09/16/2010 3:04:27 AM PDT by decimon
Archaeologists interested in the genetics of ancient organisms have a new molecular tool at hand — RNA. Two teams of scientists have decoded RNA from ancient crops in the hope of understanding the subtle evolutionary changes that accompanied the process of plant domestication.
Unlike DNA, which remains largely unchanged throughout the life of an organism, RNA molecules offer a snapshot of the activity of a cell, indicating which genes are turned on and off, and to what extent.
"With ancient DNA you can see what an ancient organism might have looked like. With ancient RNA we can see what it actually looked like," says Sarah Fordyce, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen, who presented the RNA transcriptomes (the whole set of RNA molecules present) of 700–850-year-old maize (corn) seeds at a conference there last week.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
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assortment of 11,400-year-old figs found in Israel may be the fruit of the world's earliest form of agriculture, researchers say.
The “forgotten” American grain, Amaranth, may even pre-date maize as an important Mesoamerican food crop. Likewise, it is very important to study, because it could fill in some of the gap that would be left if the US wheat crop suffered from a rust disease.
Thanks. I had the same thought the other day in a thread about sorghum bran (black and sumac). We obviously like wheat for our flours but a variety of grains should be better in a dietary sense and because different grains grow in different habitats. And because of problems like the rust disease you brought up.
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I misread the title and thought it was about scatology. Ancient craps?
Aw, mom, we had figs every night this week. Can’t you domesticate something else?
Ginger molecules make exceptionally good snaps.
not just rust, but toxic chemicals like ergot.
Maybe they should check out wood samples as well as crop grains.
Maybe they could figure out what “gopher wood” actually was.
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