Vol. 6. Num. 4 - Jul 2006
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| Martha James and Al Myers are developing corn varieties with altered starches. |
Viruses as helpers
A
new tool being developed at Iowa State by John Hill and Chunquan Zhang
will help soybean genomics scientists speed up their research, save
money and ultimately, make a better soybean.
Piecing together the soybean
genome
The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy
jointly announced they would begin to sequence the whole soybean genome
and the soybean mapping work for Randy Shoemaker will both benefit from
and aid in the sequencing project.
Figuring out how a genome
evolves
It takes about 30,000 genes to make a human being,
only five times the number of genes in yeast. According to Stephen
Proulx, the differences in number are due mostly to changes in the size
of existing gene families.
Starch designers
Martha
James and Alan Myers plan to test and market a starch that digests more
slowly. The slow starch project is a key part of the Plant Sciences
Institute's Nutrition Research Initiative.
