Thomas Hardy

Unit 9. Human Genetics and Diversity

Exercise 7. Make up a list of the 10 key facts about coffee. Agree on the final list of facts with the whole group. Then summarize everything you now know about coffee into one report.

Decaf Coffee Plants Developed

Exercise 6. In the following text the lines are mixed up. Put them in their proper order. The first and the last lines are in their correct places.

By Sarah Graham

For many coffee lovers, their precious beverage comes with an unwanted ingredient: caffeine. As a result, which solvents flush caffeine from the beans. Their next step is to apply their technique to C. arabica plants, which produce the high-quality Arabica coffee that accounts for 70 percent of the world market. Of course, it remains to percent less caffeine than regular plants do.

Three enzymes are involved in making caffeine in coffee plants. Researchers at the Nara Institute of Science the gene controlling one of these enzymes--theobromine synthase, or CaMXMT1--was repressed. Compared with processes have been developed to remove the compound, although current methods are expensive and

regular plants, leaves from one-year-old GM plants exhibited a 50 to 70 percent reduction in caffeine content.

from the plant. Researchers report today in the journal Nature that their genetically modified coffee plants have 70 apart from their low caffeine content at maturity."

According to the report, "the transgenic plants described here should yield coffee beans that are essentially normal

The scientists note that their technique could sidestep some of the problems of industrial decaffeination, in and Technology in Japan led by Shinjiro Ogita engineered seedlings of Coffea canephora in which expression of sometimes compromise flavor. But scientists may have come up with a way to get decaffeinated coffee straight

be seen if java lovers will embrace "GM joe." (From Scientific American Online, June 19, 2003)

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon,

And leaping from place to place

Over oblivion.

From a drop of water... a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet

Exercise 1. What do you know about genetics? Explain the following terms in English:

DNA, RNA Nucleic acid Gene Genome Allele Dominant / recessive gene

Ribosome Replication Transcription Translation Processing Splicing

Phenotype Genotype Enhancer Promoter Silencer Terminator

Selective breeding Hybrid Breeding (crossing) Inbreeding Pure line

Exercise 2. Discuss the following questions about genetic diversity of humans:

1. What role does genetic diversity of humans play?
2. What genetic mechanisms control population diversity?
3. To what degree are different ethnic groups genetically different?

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