Transcript: Shawn Allee, January 12, 2010 Virginia Walbot
researches corn genetics at Stanford University, and recently
she got news that didn't just make her day - it kinda made her
decade. Walbot says scientists just finished sequencing genes of
an important corn genome. "The genes are like the words in
different languages and what you need is a dictionary that lists
all those words, and that dictionary for us, is the genome
sequence." Walbot says this research could allow us to breed new
corn varieties faster than ever before. That's a big deal
because even though we benefit from corn we have now, we could
make it better. For example, corn creates environmental problems
- take corn fertilizer. "Of course, adding fertilizer really
boosts a lot of yield, but the downstream effects aren't really
great. So, there's runoff from farms that contaminates the water
supply. Making corn as efficient as possible and just giving
enough fertilizer to sustain yields, those would be fantastic
goals." Now, most corn resear