2024-04-19 22:18:57
The sugar cane genome has finally been completely deciphered by an international team of scientists who published it on March 28, 2024 in the prestigious journal Nature. It is the most harvested plant in the world: 80% of global sugar production, but also the one with the most complex DNA sequence, due both to the long history of its domestication, but also of its production, intimately linked to slavery and colonization.
How far does the science ? Even reading in the DNA of sugar cane, the entire history of its domestication and its link with slavery and colonization. The entire genome of sugar cane has just been completely sequenced and published in the scientific journal Nature.
Which was, let us point out, a real challenge: the genome of sugar cane, the most harvested plant in the world in terms of biomass, which today provides 80% of global sugar production, is formidable. complexity. Its DNA sequence includes 8.7 billion letters, twenty times more than the rice genome and… three times more than that of humans. It took five years of work, carried out in collaboration by 34 researchers from around the world, to decipher the entire genome of a variety of sugar cane, R570 for short, currently cultivated in the West Indies, on the African continent as well that at the meeting andMAURITIUS.
The 8.7 billion letters were read in one of the largest sequencing centers, in Berkeley, California; the 114 chromosomes were isolated by Australian and Czechoslovakian teams; and all these data were interpreted in Montpellier by researchers from Cirad who had begun this enormous work of sequencing the DNA of sugar cane which takes us back… 10,000 years ago in Papua New Guineawhere it was probably domesticated from a non-sweet wild species to give rise to a new sweet species.
You should know that it is the stem, the cane which stores the sucrose. This new species of sugar cane was then transported to neighboring islands in the Pacific and then to Inde and in Chine where it, again, naturally hybridized with another non-sweet wild species to give rise to new sweet species, more resistant and better adapted to less hot climates.
This astonishing journey is not only inscribed in the genes of sugar cane, but, as Florence Rozier points out in the journal The world, it is also heard in all our Indo-European languages. The word sugar comes from the Sanskrit word sarkara and is sekar in Persian. However, sugar cane was imported into Persia in the 6th century, before being introduced by the Arabs (we say sukkar in Arabic) to Cyprus and Crete in the following century, then to Andalusia in the 8th century and these were the Crusades. who, from the 12th century, introduced sugar cane into Europe or sugar (saccharum in Latin) is then sold by apothecaries for its medicinal virtues
The use of sugar then spread with the growth of trade. Sugar becomes an external sign of wealth, first reserved for aristocrats, then for the bourgeoisie. A lucrative trade also for the merchants of Venice in particular, who imported it from the Orient. Sugar cane will then be produced and cultivated on the Mediterranean islands, in the Canaries and as far as the New World, in the Americas, where it was introduced at the beginning of the 16th century. This is where everything goes wrong. Sugar consumption is becoming widespread and intensifying. The price of sugar fell as it was increasingly grown in the American colonies by slaves.
Men and women are imported en masse from Africa to work on the plantations and the sugar magnates become rich. Judge for yourself: in 1700, 10 countries exported 60,000 tons of sugar from their colonies thanks to African slaves; in 1770, it rose to 200,000 tons. “ None of this would have been possible without the brutal and unprecedented transportation of millions of enslaved Africans.underlines the British historian James Walvin. Sugar had become synonymous with slavery “. How far has sugar cane taken us? Until the worst, that is certain. Even down to our current addiction to sugar… But that’s another story.
Also read: DNA: a fundamental scientific discovery
#Deciphering #sugarcane #DNA