Pretty Flowers Lead Two Scientists to a Discovery

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I'm Alex Villarreal with the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish Not all research begins with a plan. Some studies begin by accident. Meredith Schafer says that is what happened with her and Cynthia Sagers. Cynthia Sagers is a biology professor at the University of Arkansas. Meredith Schafer is a graduate student. They were traveling in the state of North Dakota on a project. They noticed pretty yellow flowers. They recognized them as canola. Farmers grow canola for seeds to make cooking oil. Canola is also used for animal feed and biofuel. But the canola plants they saw were not growing in farm fields. They were growing along the road.The researchers decided to test the plants. They had brought along special testing papers for the project they were working on. They crushed some of the leaves in water and added the test strips. The results showed that the weedy canola plants contained genetic changes. If a plant is genetically modified, that means its genes have been changed to produce desired qualities. This past summer, the researchers from Arkansas went back to North Dakota. This time they went on a road trip to find canola. They traveled more than five thousand kilometers. They stopped about every eight kilometers to count plants and take samples to test in their vehicle. What they found, they say, was the first discovery in the United States of wild canola plants with modified genes. Mered

Published 2010-10-08 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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