Anyone eating corn for nutrition...be it now or 100 years ago...is "doing nutrition wrong." It's never been a nutrient-dense food as far as vitamins go, though it does have some nutrient quality in the way of carbs and vitamin B. It's a minor, yet noticeable, vitamin A+C contributor to nutrition. Also, the notion that our lines of supersweet corn came from radioactive/mutating experiments is grossly off the mark. Most come from lines of natural selection and breeding by John Laughnan at UI working with a gene most other breeders wouldn't touch. It is a total bastardization of John Laughnan's work (who, unlike what was stated WAS a plant breeder and botanist at U.Illinois) to claim he was by-chance poking around human-mutated "radioactive" corn to make supersweets happen. His work on the sh2 gene is one of the most important breeding pushes in the line of sweet corn. His crossses with Golden Cross Bantam (not to be confused with Golden Bantam which has been around since the early 1900s) for enhanced sweetness are his babies and it was developed with much resistance from his peers because they didn't see the value of the sh2 gene, which usually caused undesirable shrived kernels (because of less starch content and higher sugar content). One of his crosses, Illini Chief, is still sold by Burpee (who developed the initial Golden Bantam, btw), Shumway, and a few other seed sellers over 50 years after it first hit the market. Until his research into this gene it was believed to be a gene that led to inferior product rather than a line worth investigating. When his work led to incorporating the sh2 gene into corn which can produce full/plump kernel cobs, people paid attention. Btw, this was not a 1959 discovery, as stated by the author...he published his initial work on the sh2 gene as a breeding gene worth investigating in 1953 and his work started years earlier. I have no idea where he/she got her information on Dr. Laughnan from, but he/she should check that source again. John Laughnan is a bit of a hero to many in the breeding industry. This kinda pokes me wrong a bit personally to see his name/work trashed like this...and his work cheapened to being some fool who stumbled upon his discovery. It's so off the mark it's insulting. He was far ahead of his time given that supersweets took another 1-2 decades to even become popular in breeding. His work with developing the sh2 gene from a shriveled-kernel "undesirable" gene into a farmer/consumer market changer ranks right up there with Lamborn and Parker's work with the sugar snap pea that led to the "modern" sugar snap we've enjoyed since the 1970s. It was a game changer that went ignored for far too long given the long cultivation history of the plant(s). This post was edited by nc-crn on Sun, May 26, 13 at 20:56

An interesting article, but the opening paragraph is puzzling: >Until recently, it was assumed by scientists is that the autumnal coloring >of leaves was caused by waste products accumulated in the leaves which >only become apparent with the fading of green chlorophyll pigments. >However, recent research indicates that fall color pigments are produced, or >revealed, only in living leaf cells during the seasonal process of leaf >senescence and that they serve to protect cellular functions during this >critical time. I've never heard of anthocyanins and carotenoids described as "waste products", and the idea that they provide a protective function is not new by any stretch.

Yes, Bioluminescence has been infused into plants. However, as it is not naturally synthesized by most plants, and they are not designed to bioluminesce, it requires an enormous amount of energy to maintain all basic plant functions and still bioluminesce. It has been accomplished with tobacco by germinating a seed in water mixed with Luciferase Enzyme. There are several naturally occurring fungi that bioluminesce, and there are a great many patents for methods of forcing plants to bioluminesce. One particular US Patent is for splicing a luminescence gene into the reproductive gene for flowering plants. It did cause the plant to produce bioluminescent flowers, but it also introduced sterility. There have also been attempts to infuse plants' genotypes with aequorin, the bioluminescent chemical found in some jellyfish.

I referenced a thread above, with this video about Nigari & tomato sweetness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmXu4dr.R1S8 Nigari has a lot of Magnesium ( & sea water trace minerals) so the role of mineral "salts" is what will discuss. Metal ions impact the genetic code signal in several ways. They can stabilize the genetic information coils or torque them out of position, influencing how that genetic program is read . This means that the precise "kick-starter" of a specific protein ( what the gene expresses to be made, in order to start things going) can be influenced by trace minerals. A deficiency of a vital trace mineral causes too little of the genetic signal "kick-starter". An excess of a trace mineral can destabilize the configuration of the master code strands & cause a different "kick-starter" protein to be expressed. As this pertains to Nigari (opposed to NaCl, sodium chloride salt, which increases conductivity to reduce water intake, makes tomato fruit smaller & thus concentrates % of sugar ) the likely sweetness factor to follow is Mg. Let's scale back up to enzymes. Tomato fruit uses sucrose, when young, to develop seeds. The sucrose form of sugar will eventually get acted on by sucrose specific enzymes & broken apart into other sugar molecules. As fruit develops the fructose form of sugar is a byproduct (mature fruits' sugar is in the form of lots of fructose). Here begins a factor of how sweet can things get & it is a dynamic influenced by trace minerals. On one hand, the fructose building up in the fruit tends to inhibit the very enzymes that specificly break apart sucrose & let the fructose "out" . It is a genetic program & why some tomatoes don't get sweeter than a certain degree. Yet, on another front, the enzymes that act specificly on fructose act to clear the cell structure (cytosol) where sucrose is made of all that built up fructose. This is a circumstance that, in effect, takes the "lock" off the sucrose enzymes & the result is that sucrose can again get acted on so sucrose's fructose is again let out (ie: fruit gets even sweeter). Which brings us back to the trace metal ions. There is evidence one of the key sucrose transformational enzymes is Mg++. It is not that this trace mineral is incorporated into the enzyme itself, but what it does. Previously it was explained how trace mineral "salts" influence a protein structure (peptide) formation to occur. This is the 3 dimensional key refinement that is shaping the event. In other words, the trace mineral ions rule the bridging that might occur between a protein's amino acid (components that define the type of protein) & this specific geneticly expressed protein's intended receptor site. If no docking is possible by that protein "sent" from the gene then no enzyme goes to work. Nigari's Mg++ possibly may make tomatoes sweeter through "over-driving" the interplay of the sugar (sucrose & fructose) regulating enzymes, by making both enzyme's bridging phase go quickly . It may be possible that Nigari's other ++ trace minerals can favorably orientate (twist) the genetic informational strands so that enzyme proteins are produced (expressed) that "hot-wire" some tomato varieties into sugar processing. In this last case, the unknown ++ trace mineral would work by causing more total production of the actual enzymes that act on sucrose & fructose sugars (as opposed to making these enzymes work faster). This would only be possible in geneticly pre-disposed tomato varieties. It would be interesting to hear anyone's suggestions on how much & when to use Nigari.