Arabidopsis
Sabina Leonelli, “Growing Weed, Producing Knowledge: An Epistemic History of Arabidopsis Thaliana,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 29, no. 2 (2007): 193–223.
URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23334228
Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, “Analysis of the Genome Sequence of the Flowering Plant Arabidopsis Thaliana,” Nature 408, no. 6814 (December 14, 2000): 796–815
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35048692
Jimsonweed
A. F. Blakeslee and B. T. Avery, “Adzuki Beans and Jimson Weeds: Favorable Class Material for Illustrating the Ratios of Mendel’s Law—Actual Practice in Making Counts Is Necessary Before the Student Can Fully Grasp Modern Ideas of Heredity,” Journal of Heredity 8, no. 3 (March 1, 1917): 125–31.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a111733
Albert F. Blakeslee and B. T. Avery, “Mutations in the Jimson Weed,” Journal of Heredity 10, no. 3 (March 1, 1919): 111–20.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a101893
Albert F. Blakeslee and Amos G. Avery, “Methods of inducing doubling of chromosomes in plants by treatment with colchicine,” Journal of Heredity 28 (1937): 393–411.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a104294
Mark Jackson, “‘Divine Stramonium’: The Rise and Fall of Smoking for Asthma,” Medical History 54, no. 2 (April 2010): 171–94.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300000235
Favorite papers of our interviewees
Professor Ware
Schnable et al., “The B73 Maize Genome: Complexity, Diversity, and Dynamics,” Science 326, 5956 (Nov. 20, 2009): 1112-1115
“One of my favorite papers still is the first maize genome that was published. I think it was just the basic science that came out of that from the first genome, even though it wasn’t as high quality as we see now, was still just amazing to see. It was very amazing that we could clearly articulate what the two sub-genomes were, we could look at the differences. We got our first footprint of most of the genes in one maize plant, and it was working with a large consortium to get it done. I still really enjoyed that. That’s one of my favorite things.” August 31, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1178534
Professor Martienssen
Meilina Ong-Abdullah et al., “Loss of Karma Transposon Methylation Underlies the Mantled Somaclonal Variant of Oil Palm,” Nature 525, no. 7570 (September 24, 2015): 533–37.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15365
Oil palms are a key source of vegetable oil worldwide as well as a potential source of biofuel. For both environmental and economic reasons, growers want to cultivate only the highest-yielding specimens. Decades ago, scientists succeeded in cloning some of these prime plants only to discover that the fruit from these cloned plants was dry and worthless, with no valuable oil. The term for this is “mantled.” What was going on? Martienssen and his colleagues discovered that an epigenetic effect was at work — the absence of a methyl tag on a gene relating to the development of the plant’s sexual organs resulted in a faulty protein that leads the plant to produce mantled fruit. An epigenetic test is now available that growers can use to detect and cull plants with the faulty methylation, thus saving land and resources. Read more here, in an interview with Professor Martienssen conducted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.