Just look at that banana genome Venn diagram

Just look at it.

The banana (Musa acuminata) genome and the evolution of monocotyledonous plants Angélique D’Hont, France Denoeud, Jean-Marc Aury, Franc-Christophe Baurens, Françoise Carreel, Olivier Garsmeur, Benjamin Noel, Stéphanie Bocs, Gaëtan Droc, Mathieu Rouard, Corinne Da Silva, Kamel Jabbari, Céline Cardi, Julie Poulain, Marlène Souquet, Karine Labadie, Cyril Jourda, Juliette Lengellé, Marguerite Rodier-Goud, Adriana Alberti, Maria Bernard, Margot Correa, Saravanaraj Ayyampalayam, Michael R. Mckain, Jim Leebens-Mack et al. Nature (2012) doi:10.1038/nature11241

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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hfredricks

This looks like real science, could you give us the citation please Cory?
Christopher Ing

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nature11241_F4.html
hfredricks

wow, Nature, respect. That real science! Those bio guys have all the cool figures.
http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

Couldn’t you just eat it up!
Fang Xianfu

I loved that the banana shape was included as a background, then I loved it even more when I realised it was part of the diagram!
fuzzyfuzzyfungus

But what part of the diagram tells me, a Swing Voter, what part of the banana Obama promised and what part he delivered?
- http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan
  
  Somebody had to bring that up didn’t they. A guy abuses a diagrammatic convention only once, all hell breaks loose and they never let him forget it. Hasn’t he suffered enough? Won’t somebody think of his children?
http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

The banana is perfectly adapted to demonstrate a six component Venn diagram. This clearly cannot be an accident. I declare evolution falsified.
- http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan
  
  Designed! I meant to say designed, not adapted, goddammit.
  - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
    
    Your scientific beliefs are leaking.
- http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai
  
  Stole my joke!
planettom

Periodically I see figures that we share 75% of our DNA with dogs, and 97% with chimps. Apparently we share 50% to 60% with bananas.
- fuzzyfuzzyfungus
  
  My (admittedly layman’s) undertanding is that you are hard-pressed to have a functional eukaryotic metabolism without ~50% commonality with just about everything else that does(especially if the percentage numbers only count nuclear DNA, and thus obfuscate the difference between things with mitochondria and things with chloroplasts…)
  
  It’s actually pretty remarkable how much of the genome codes essential-but-boring life support functions, and how little appears to be at play for the sophisticated, high-level functions that get the philosophers worked up…
- malindrome
  
  Don’t tell Ridley Scott, he might get ideas.
er0ck

Musa Acuminata (Cavendish) is the common banana most of us are used to in the grocery in the US. Actually it’s usually a hybrid Musa acuminata × balbisiana, not shown here. A fruit with almost as much blood on its hands as the catholic church…
Dylan Foster

Could someone explain what exactly is going on here?
- Jonathan Badger
  
  Yes. What this is is a six-way Venn diagram showing the distribution of shared gene families across multiple plant genomes, including banana, which has just been sequenced. The take home message is that while many families are universal (no surprise), there is a surprisingly large number of families (2809, center upper left), specific to the Poaceae, the family of plants that include banana, rice, and sorghum.
  - Jonathan Badger
    
    Just a slight self correction — bananas are actually members of family Musaceae, and what makes it surprising is that it suggests a closer relationship between them and the Poaceae.
http://twitter.com/pishabh pishabh

Mildly erotic. Just mildly though…
Just_Ok

The words per author ratio is pretty low.
- Jonathan Badger
  
  It doesn’t work that way in science — you don’t have many authors because a paper is long — you have many authors because it look that many scientists to get the results. Besides, this is in Nature, which has strict limits on the length of articles — which means that most of the actual data and analysis is hidden in the “supplemental information” and the paper itself almost an abstract.
http://twitter.com/yourhost_dimly r diamondstein

how long must we ignore the giant goatse in the room?
- http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan
  
  Coffee up nose. Damn you.
cubby96

Two things.

First, there must be some sort of meta-message behind all of these banana posts from Cory. A secret code, perhaps, wrapped up in the first character of the image’s metadata or something more/less technical.

Second, that is a really cool diagram.
Boundegar

I will be so upset if a cat eats that Venn diagram.
- jackbird
  
  If it’s wearing a Venn diagram Halloween costume, I say have at it.