Flash animation technology is no longer supported by web browsers. Several DNALC websites were built using Flash and we have installed the open-source Flash emulator, Ruffle, on some of them. Unfortunately, due to the structure of the site, Weed to Wonder cannot be supported using Ruffle and the Flash version has been retired. We have made the original version of the Weed to Wonder site, created in simple HTML, available. Much of the animation and video content is available in the Resources section of this site. If there is content you can no longer find, please email dnalc-it@cshl.edu.
Corn is the most important agricultural crop in the New World. However, its amazing rise—from a common weed, to staple food and cultural icon of Native Americans, to modern hybrid cultivar, to versatile and ubiquitous component of processed food, to precursor of clothing and motor fuels, to pharmaceutical factory—is little known to students or the general public. Weed to Wonder tells the story of how human ingenuity transformed a common Mexican weed (teosinte) into a modern food wonder (maize).
The sequencing of the maize genome is a landmark in the history of plant biology and the largest single commitment to plant research in the history of the National Science Foundation. To commemorate the publication of the maize sequence we developed an interactive “e-book” that can be viewed as a website or a printable PDF.
Weed to Wonder shows the continuity of research on corn—from Native American agriculturalists to agricultural breeders, corn geneticists, plant physiologists, and molecular biologists—that culminated in the Maize Genome Sequencing Project.