Why did red pepper become so hot as a result of evolution? Detailed answer

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Why did red pepper become so hot as a result of evolution? Detailed answer

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Why did red pepper become so hot as a result of evolution?

The active component of red pepper, which is responsible for its burning taste, is the alkaloid capsaicin. Biologists believe that the high content of this substance is the result of natural selection to encourage birds to eat this plant, and not mammals. The fact is that birds do not react at all to the hotness of capsaicin, and red pepper grains pass through their digestive tract unchewed and can germinate in a new place.

Authors: Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Why does a woodpecker peck at a tree?

Most of us think when we hear a woodpecker knock on a tree that it is ruining it by chipping. But everything is just the opposite. The woodpecker helps the tree survive.

First of all, woodpeckers are birds that live in trees. They feed on trees. Beetles and insects are hidden under the bark of trees. The woodpecker gets them by scent, although they are not visible from the outside. The woodpecker punches a hole exactly where the insects are and eats them. In most cases, these insects are harmful to the tree.

How does the woodpecker get to the insects inside the tree? One reason is that the woodpecker's beak is very sharp and strong, resembling a chisel. The woodpecker has a unique language. In some species, it is twice as long as the entire head. The tongue is round in cross section, hard at the end and with tiny denticles along the edges. In the beak, the tongue is twisted like a spring. When a woodpecker takes an insect out of a tree, it can stick its tongue deep into the hollow.

The woodpecker hollows not only living trees. He uses his chisel beak to gouge holes in dead trees. The woodpecker makes a nest there. Sometimes these birds make two holes, as if an entrance and an exit. This gives woodpeckers the opportunity to escape if an uninvited guest looks into the nest.

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Random news from the Archive

Received a plant with genes from one parent 27.11.2021

Scientists from the University of California Davis (USA) were able to remove half the genome from a plant. This mechanism makes it easier and faster to develop crops with desired properties, such as disease resistance.

Plants that reproduce sexually inherit the appropriate set of chromosomes from each parent. In order to pass on a favorable trait, such as pest or drought resistance, to all their offspring, a plant must have the same genetic variant on each chromosome. To create a plant that reproduces in this way, as a rule, it is necessary to cross more than one generation.

Back in 2010, researchers discovered a way to eliminate the genetic contribution of one parent when growing a laboratory plant, Tal's clover. They modified a protein called CENH3 found in the centromere, a structure at the center of the chromosome. When they tried to cross a wild-type Tal's arachnid with plants modified with CENH3, they got a generation and a half of the normal number of chromosomes. Part of the genome of one parent has been removed to create a haploid plant.

This development has made it possible to achieve the same result for crops such as corn, wheat and tomatoes.

Subsequently, it was not possible to accurately reproduce this mechanism. But now scientists from the UC Davis Genome Center are getting closer to the puzzle. They were able to modify the CENH3 protein so that it was removed from the DNA in the female gamete before fertilization, weakening the centromere.

"In subsequent embryonic divisions, CENH3-depleted centromeres contributed by the egg cannot compete with CENH3-rich centromeres contributed by sperm, and the female genome is deleted," the authors noted.

The discovery could help shorten crop selection time in the future.

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