Title:
Learning the Secrets of the Potato, and an Enemy
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Scientists now have a genetic map of the potato. The
project is the work of a team from fourteen
countries, the Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium.
Potatoes are one of the world's leading food crops.
But potato breeders currently spend ten to twelve
years developing new kinds. Now they will be able to
locate genes for any desired trait, improving
quality, nutritional value and disease resistance.
A genome contains information about every position
along chromosomes, the structures that hold genes.
Genes direct the making of proteins which do much of
the work in building an organism, whether a person
or a potato. A potato has twelve chromosomes and
about eight hundred forty million base pairs. This
is about one-fourth the size of the human genome.
The potato genome is not yet final but it shows the
order of ninety-five percent of the genes. Most
potato varieties carry four separate copies of their
genes. But the researchers did much of their work
with a phureja, a kind of a potato that has only one
copy. Richard Veilleux, a professor at Virginia
Tech, provided that variety of potato.
Plant biologist Robin Buell at Michigan State
University also worked on the genome. She says it
will improve understanding of other crops because
potatoes are related to tomatoes, peppers and
eggplants.
In a separate development, another team reported
completing a genome of the organism responsible for
late blight. That disease can infect potatoes,
tomatoes and some other plants. It causes several
billion dollars a year in agricultural losses around
the world.
But late blight was also the cause of the potato
famine in Ireland in the middle of the eighteen
hundreds. Potato shortages caused at least one
million deaths and a wave of Irish immigration to
America.
The scientists say that in the short term, studies
based on the new genome may help explain why the
pathogen has been so aggressive. And in the long
term, they say, knowing where different genetic
traits may be found on the map could lead to better
plants. It could also reduce the need for chemicals.
Completion of the project was announced in the
journal Nature. Researchers at Harvard University
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led
the work.
And thats the VOA Special English Agriculture
Report.You can find all of our reports, with
transcripts and MP3s, at voaspecialenglish.com.
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
