2024-07-26 22:04:29
The sugarcane genome has finally been completely defined by an international team of scientists who published on March 28, 2024 in the popular journal Creation. It is the most harvested plant in the world: 80% of the world’s sugar production, but the one with the most difficult DNA sequence, due to the long history of its soil, but of its production, linked to domestication and colonialism. . (Revised from April 20, 2024).
How far is it? science ? Also read in the DNA of sugar cane, the entire history of the homeland and its link with slavery and colonization. The entire genome of sugarcane has just been completely sequenced and published in a scientific journal Creation.
That is, let us point out, a real challenge: the genetics of sugarcane, the most harvested plant in the world in terms of biomass, which provides 80% of the world’s sugar production, is complex. 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 several sugar canes, R570 per short, currently cultivated in the West, in Africa as well that is Reunion andMAURITIUS.
8.7 billion letters, 114 chromosomes
8.7 billion letters are read in one of the largest process centers, in Berkeley, California; 114 chromosomes were isolated by the Australian and Czechoslovakian groups; and all these data were interpreted in Montpellier by researchers from Cirad who has started this great work of sequencing the DNA of sugar cane which takes us back… 10,000 years ago Papua New Guineawhere it is possible from unsavory wild species to give a new type of flavor.
You should know that it is a tree, a plant that stores sucrose. This new type of sugar cane was transported to neighboring islands in the Pacific and then to Inde and inside China where it is, again, naturally hybrid with other non-sweet wild species to give rise to new sweet species, more resistant and better exposed to less heat.
This extraordinary journey is not only documented in the genetics of sugarcane, but, as Florence Rosier points out in the journal. Chance, 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, sugarcane was imported to Persia in the sixth century, before the Arabs (sukkar in Arabic) to Cyprus and Crete in the next century, then to Andalusia in the 8th century and these were the Crusades. from the 12th century, made sugar cane into Europe or sugar (saccharum in Latin) was then sold by apothecaries for its medicinal properties.
With the rise of trade, sugar became a symbol of wealth
The use of sugar then spread with the development of commerce. Sugar became an outward sign of wealth, first reserved for the aristocrats, then for the bourgeoisie. A profitable trade also provided the merchants of Venice in particular, who imported from the East. The sugarcane that they used to make later would be grown in the Mediterranean islands, in the Canary Islands and up to the New World, in America, where it was made in the early 16th century. This is where everything goes wrong. Sugar consumption is spreading and increasing. The price of sugar fell as it grew in the American colonies through slaves.
«Sugar has become synonymous with slavery »
Men and women were recruited from Africa to work on the plantations and the sugar magnates became 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 unplanned transportation of millions of enslaved Africans.underlines the British historian James Walvin. Sugar has become synonymous with slavery “. How cane has taken us far? Up to the worst, that’s for sure. Even down to the current addiction to sugar… But that has another story.
Read againDNA: A basic scientific discovery
#Sugarcane #DNA #determination