Paramutation and maize

44:12are super grateful for all of you in FFP Nation and the audience who have been super supportive of the show. We are super excited to get back on the hopper here. We have some great great episodes lined up. But before we get to those great episodes, we need to finish up because I'm very curious about how we now talk about epigenetics as it relates to this background we've just talked about on Mandelian genetics. >> Right. So what we've talked about so far is just the genetic part of things and even then we've only talked about Mendele's rules and from our understanding now it's been 160 years of study. It is a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening. Now, the

44:53goal here is to predict from genetic input what the offspring's genotype is going to be, what the offspring's genetic m makeup is going to be, and then how the offspring is going to look on the outside, right? By by look, I mean like what are the traits that it has, okay? Even if it's on the inside, right? But that that's what we call a phenotype compared to the genotype, which is just the actual genetic makeup. Now, as people worked on this over many many years, anomalies started piling up. Okay, there are several several. We are going to focus on um just one. Okay, the anomaly is called paramutation. It starts with maze. It was first documented in the 1950s by geneticist

45:35Alexander Brink when he was studying the red one locus in mae location of the red one gene in maze. Maize is just corn, but biologists always say maze for some reason. Okay. Um, maybe someone can tell me why in the comments, but I've never seen someone just say corn, [laughter] but then I look at the photos and it's just corn. Okay, anyways, so the the the red one location in this organism controls for the anthocyanin pigment. Okay, and that's the pigment that is responsible for the dark coloring of corn kernels. You've seen like those like exotic corn that like it's like purple. That's what this is. Okay, >> so that's the trait that we're going to look at. And in Zim, we have this dish

46:16called sodza, which is cornmeal. And you can have sort of, you know, different color styles. You usually don't use when you have that uh red pigment style, you'll usually just cook it straight. You won't make that into cornmeal. It'll usually be either yellow or white. But that's it's an we call it maze back home. Yeah. Um which is interesting. >> Yeah. But like but these are Americans that are working on it. So that's what I just want to know what what's going on. Okay. [laughter] Like even like um um Dorothy um no it's um Barbara Mcccleintoch with the jumping jeans. She discovered those in maze. It's maze. >> Maze. >> Okay, whatever. Anyways, so let's let's talk about this red one location. Okay, the anthocyanin pigment pathway. Here is

46:56what he observed. Okay, what I'm going to do is do kind of the same thing that um Mendle used to do, which is I'm going to get two true breeding plants. one that has the purple pigment thingy and then one that doesn't. I'm going to cross those.