RE: OT Plant cell biology - red

That red of tomato sauce is not entirely due to Lycopene, I've read.  Some
other pigments--and perhaps co-pigments--are involved.  Can't get much redder
than ketchup, can it!

Extractions from tomatoes separate out the pigments.  The Lycopene involved is
decidedly on the yellow side of red.

Yes, an orange-red iris would be astounding, would it not!  But I think
Colleen's point about the blue rose is very apt.

Seems to me, to transplant a genetic sequence, one has to find it first.
Which chromosome is it on?  Where on the chromosome is it?  What is its DNA
sequence?  The kicker in that is--"genes" can be from thousands into the
millions of bp's (shorthand for "base-pairs") long!

Then--worse yet--just where do you put it when you've got it?  The position of
a sequence on a chromosome has to be face forward, not face backward, and be
on the "sense" (left-hand) side of the double helix, and have its
complementary sequence with it.  Put in backwards, it could simply kill the
cell, or do some wild and crazy things with the phenotype.  (More fun).

Then--getting the cell to behave as though it were a gamete and begin to
replicate an entire plant instead of some derivative tissue--as well as
getting the cell to respond to the gravity gradient so a root develops at one
end and a stem (protorhizome) at the other, which is not easily done, even
though the techniques for doing this were well under development more than
forty years ago on things like carrot (Daucus carota--or something close to
that) slurry.

The very thought of all this makes my head hurt.  No wonder millions of
dollars, as Colleen mentions, have been expended on the blue rose project.

I think OSU and Rick Ernst have their work definitely cut out for them.  I
just wish they had tackled the anthocyanin project, not the Lycopene one.

Neil Mogensen  z  7   western NC mountains

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