Science Daily reports on a technology partnership to sequence the cacao genome. With candy giant Mars supplying the money, the Subtropical Horticultural Research Station (Miami) of the USDA doing the research, and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center using its Blue Gene supercomputer to do the number crunching, the results are destined for the public domain for any and everyone to freely use.
IBM’s
Blue Gene
The obvious goal of the research is to help create cacao plants that are resistant to the devastating diseases that cost an estimated $700 million dollars of damage annually and regularly devastate growing regions. Brazil, for example, is only now recovering from a Witch’s Broom infection which struck in the 1980s.
Around the TCHO offices, we’ve been speculating on other potential benefits, including designing plants that can grow in more stable political regions outside the tropics, or that bear fruit that doesn’t need fermenting, that have hyper-doses of polyphenols, or are caffeine-free, or that taste of the first kiss you ever enjoyed.
(Thanks and a tip of our hat to the ever insightful Kevin Kelly.)
Sequencing cacao
Science Daily reports on a technology partnership to sequence the cacao genome. With candy giant Mars supplying the money, the Subtropical Horticultural Research Station (Miami) of the USDA doing the research, and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center using its Blue Gene supercomputer to do the number crunching, the results are destined for the public domain for any and everyone to freely use.
Blue Gene
The obvious goal of the research is to help create cacao plants that are resistant to the devastating diseases that cost an estimated $700 million dollars of damage annually and regularly devastate growing regions. Brazil, for example, is only now recovering from a Witch’s Broom infection which struck in the 1980s.
Around the TCHO offices, we’ve been speculating on other potential benefits, including designing plants that can grow in more stable political regions outside the tropics, or that bear fruit that doesn’t need fermenting, that have hyper-doses of polyphenols, or are caffeine-free, or that taste of the first kiss you ever enjoyed.
(Thanks and a tip of our hat to the ever insightful Kevin Kelly.)
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