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Gene editing could create spicy tomatoes, say researchers
Spicy tomatoes could soon be on the menu thanks to the rise of genome-editing technology, say researchers. It is not the first time experts have claimed the techniques could help to precisely and rapidly develop fruits and vegetables with unusual traits: scientists have already been looking at changing the colour of kiwi fruits and tweaking the taste of strawberries.
But researchers in Brazil and Ireland say such methods also could offer practical advantages, with spicy tomatoes offering a way of harvesting capsaicinoids, the pungent chemicals found in chilli peppers.
[...] Tomatoes and chilli peppers developed from a common ancestor but diverged about 19m years ago. "All the genes to produce capsaicinoids exist in the tomato, they are just not active," Zsögön said.
Capsaicinoids: Pungency beyond Capsicum (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2018.11.001) (DX)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Tuesday January 08 2019, @06:54PM (1 child)
I actually missed a great example I have personal experience with as far as innate capabilities go.
I have aphantasia [scientificamerican.com]. Most people can close their eyes, and if asked to visualize a beach, they'll actually perceive an image of a beach. You can ask them about details, and they'll tell you what they're seeing.
I can't do that. I've never been able to. I can't visualize anything at all when I'm conscious. No images of any kind. When I sleep, and dream, I do get some visualization, but it seems to be very vague, as I have never recalled any detail at all from a dream afterwards. For most of my life I thought when someone said something like "you can see this in your mind's eye", I thought that was just a metaphor for remembering a description in words-and-feelings. I didn't realize it was an actual image.
Since it turns out most people can do this (97% or more can visualize people, scenes and objects when they try), I feel like I lost a significant bit of the "innate human capabilities" lottery there. Would I take a genetic fix for this if I could? You bet. In a heartbeat. Maybe even faster.
Perhaps as an attempt at compensation, I am very into photography. Photos have always served me as a visual memory. If I don't have, or can't find elsewhere, a photo of something, or physically get back to the scene, person or object, I'll never see it again. So I shoot a lot of pictures. I've been doing that since I first managed to get my hands on a camera back in the 1960's.
Also, as a teenager, I indulged in using LSD; under the influence, I definitely imagined things visually — eyes closed and open. I was very fond of the drug specifically because of the awesome visuals, but it didn't even occur to me back then that this might be something along the lines of "normal" that I was missing when not high. I only found out when I accidentally ran into an article that described the condition. That was a very interesting day for me. In the Chinese sense of the imprecation "may you live in interesting times."
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On the Canary Islands, there isn't even one canary.
On the Virgin Islands... still no canaries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @07:21PM
No virgins on either :)
And thanks for the story, it is interesting to hear from people who have some odd man out feature to them :)