Helen FieldsScience Writer

For today’s paper, I wrote about late blight – you may know it better as potato blight, the disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine. It’s still a huge problem for potato and tomato farmers, so a bunch of scientists sequenced its genome (their paper is in Nature today). Here’s my story.

Usually when I read about some new genome sequence, I get a big “eh” feeling. As in, “eh, big string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, who cares.” But this is a really cool disease, and super important economically, and it turns out the genome itself is interesting, too.

The organism that causes late blight has a ginormous genome, with a ton of repeating sequences of DNA. Those big repeaty areas include lots of copies of the nasty genes that help it attack plants, like genes that cause cell death and stuff. So maybe there’s some way that the bug is using those extra copies to overcome the plants’ defenses. Cool, huh?

Chad Nussbaum, the guy at the Broad Institute whose group did the sequencing, said this genome was really hard because of all the repeats – and it helped them figure out stuff they can use later. “Every genome teaches you something new,” he told me. “They’re all strange in their own little ways.”

Best thing I found while working on this story: PotatoPro, a news source for the potato processing industry with headlines like “Sultry Sally has re-launched its low fat potato chip with even less fat” and “Man dies after falling into potato harvester.”

Ah, the classic evening meal of cheapskates in Berlin:

It’s a döner im Brot. It’s kind of a variation on a gyro – mystery meat shaved off a rotating hunk o’ broily goodness, stuffed in bread with sauce, slaw, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, and deliciousness. So much deliciousness. And if there’s not enough carbohydrates in the bread, you can add fries and a soda. Incidentally, Coke tastes so much better here, because it’s sweetened with sugar instead of corn syrup. Mmmm. Suuugarrrrr.

Anyway, this is actually the first döner I’ve had on this trip…and you can probably tell it’s in a mall food court. You’re supposed to buy them from sketchy stands. I’ll do better next time. I was in the mall! It was almost 7:00! I was hungry! I’m sorry! It won’t happen again!

Part of the deal with this fellowship is that I’m also supposed to do my regular work. So, here it is: a news story about rice genetics. I know, it sounds boring, but it’s totally not! Modifying rice is a big deal – in 2005, 20 percent of the world’s calories came from rice, and production is going to have to increase to keep up with population growth. So this piece is about one cool new study on finding a gene that helps rice survive floods.

An interesting point about this work is how old-school it is. They’re looking for genes, but not using super-newfangled proteomics or whatever techniques – instead, they look for them by doing lots of mating plants together and looking for crossovers, like I learned about in intro biology in approximately 1994. Ok, yeah, computers do all the calculations now. But if they were teaching it in intro biology in 1994, believe me, it was basic.

Then when they find the gene, they don’t put it into another plant with viruses or fancy-schmancy genetic transformations – they do it with breeding. Sure, they use molecular techniques to make sure they’re getting the right genes in the offspring (this speeds things wayyyy up). But basically it’s good, old-fashioned plant sex.

Neat, huh? Made me want to learn more about the world of rice research.

I’m so glad I asked the downstairs neighbor to do my shopping today (my illness being such that I really don’t want to leave my apartment unless it’s for a medical facility). He was fast, and it wasn’t out of his way, which was nice, but most importantly: I got to learn the ultimate German home remedy for stomach problems.

There it is, my friends. This is the value of life overseas: learning that, whatever ails your digestive system, what you really need is pretzel sticks and coke. Two doctors did ask me if I was drinking coke and seemed a little surprised that I wasn’t. I look forward to trying the local folk remedy this afternoon.

Oh hey – another of my National Geographic stories turned up online! It’s about vanilla, which is native to central America but has until recently mostly been grown in Madagascar. I reported this story and the story about silky sifakas at the same time. And get this neat bit of synergy: the silky sifaka is a lemur that lives in a region of Madagascar where a lot of vanilla is grown. Whoooa. Trippy.

I wish I still remembered all the fascinating things I learned about vanilla…but I wrote it 10 months ago, so the details have gotten a bit muddied. I heard a lot of tales about sketchiness in the vanilla trade, but they were way outside of the scope of this short piece, so I didn’t try to confirm them. I did come away from the whole thing with the impression that the only way I was going to be sure any vanilla extract I used didn’t contain any artificial flavorings was to make it myself. Vanilla beans aren’t as expensive as you’d think, if you buy them on the internet, and they’re so much better than the sad, dry, crusty ones they sell in jars at the grocery store.

Someone helpfully stopped by my post on sardines and left a link to this blog: Society for the Appreciation of the Lowly Tinned Sardine. It includes many lovely photographs of sardine tins on well-appointed plates – apparently you’re supposed to actually smack the opened can down in the middle of all your tasty garden vegetables and stuff. They also seem to put a lot of thought into the drinks paired with the sardines. Huh.

Wow, check it out: chocolate sardines. Don’t worry, there’s no actual sardines inside those wrappers. I hope. If anyone’s in France around Easter, I want some – you hear me?

The other day I was at the grocery store, and I had tuna on my list. It’s easy, it keeps more or less forever, it fits in cans, I can put it on salads. But then when I was actually standing in front of the canned fish, I was hit by this sudden wave of guilt at using giant, long-lived fish at the top of the food chain for cheap protein. I’ve heard many talks in which people who understand the oceans say we really ought to be eating bait fish. (And I’ve been buying tuna all along, so I don’t know why the guilt chose last Saturday to set in.) I looked at the other cans on the shelf.

Which brings me to today’s lunch:

I haven’t quite been able to figure out the full environmental implications of this choice. Fish are confusing. If you look up “tuna” on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website, there are six different kinds of tuna, and whether or not you should buy them depends on how they’re caught. If you look up sardines, they give you two options, actual sardines and atlantic herring – but it seems that what I have is actually a little Atlantic fish called a “brisling” or “sprat,” which the Monterey Bay Aquarium doesn’t cover. (Read about sprat here.)

But I do understand food webs, and sardines are way lower down than tuna are. It’s like eating grain-eating chickens instead of man-eating tigers – it’s a more efficient use of resources. Fortunately, they taste pretty good. I polled my Facebook friends, and the consensus was that they should be on toast. A former choir director also suggested a large whisky and soda. I haven’t added that particular flourish yet, but I can’t imagine a large whisky and soda would make anything worse.

A moment of culture clash: today I interviewed a researcher in England about his work on poop, only he didn’t call it poop, he called it poo. I hope to quote him on that. We also bonded on the topic of how much you miss lettuce when you can’t get it, although my experience is from the last couple of weeks of a 40-day boat trip, and his is three months of the year on a remote subantarctic island. That’s a long time to go without lettuce. I didn’t think to ask him if they have alcohol on his island.

I’m sorry, it’s taken me much too long to get to this. After my successful oreo inquiry, I knew had to get to the bottom of the question: how do the shipboard Ritz crackers (prepackaged in pairs, for soup-related usage) compare to the civilian Ritz I bought in Unalaska? You may recall, the shipboard oreos are smaller than regular oreos and they taste worse.

I was already pretty sure that the ship’s Ritz crackers tasted worse, and today a side-by-side taste comparison confirmed that they kind of taste like plastic. This isn’t surprising, because they live in plastic, and the ones in the box are wrapped in that nice wax-paper-y sleeve[oops - it's plastic, too. but less flavorful plastic, or something]. So the only question remaining was: are they smaller?

And here is the shocking conclusion. They aren’t smaller. On closer examination, the ship’s Ritz actually turn out to be *bigger*. I know. I was shocked.

Nilla wafers appeared in the snack bins today before lunch, but unfortunately I won’t be able to advance knowledge on that front – I didn’t bring any with me to compare them to. (My roommate suggests sending a shipwide e-mail to see if anyone brought some, but I have limits.)

The other day I took a packet of oreos from the snack bins on the mess deck and, yknow, they seemed really small. Chris and I have declared today No-Science Friday, so between reporting stories about the Coast Guard, I grabbed another packet of oreos and brought them to my room to compare against the cookies from a regular package I bought in Dutch Harbor. Behold:

The oreo on the left is totally smaller. It doesn’t taste as good, either. My roommate Liz speculates whether the lower cookie-to-filling ratio is to blame. (The mini-pack oreo is also totally shorter if you look at it from the side.)

By the way, you should see how the scientists perk up when they hear us talking about No-Science Friday. Then we explain that it’s just for us. Sorr-yyyyy.