Finding What Puts The Heat In Hot Peppers
Hot peppers Warren Rachele (Wrachele) via Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons To engineer a better pepper, you'd have to go out into the field—actual fields, around the world—and look at different traits, measurements, and yield. Then, after extracting DNA from various leaves and seeds, you could painstakingly evaluate for the different traits. On Sunday, a large (seriously, look at that list of authors) international team of scientists published the genome of the hot pepper for the first time. The information that lies within the genome could mean a more efficient plant breeding process, but it also helps reveal a few interesting secrets hiding within the pepper's genes. Because peppers are not so different from their cousins, the potato and tomato, the genome could also elucidate more about the evolution and adaptation of other delicious species. One of the study's co-authors, Allen Van Deynze, has been working with peppers...