This week's Genomics Forum, in which bioinformaticists get together and in theory talk about interesting issues and common problems and solutions, but in practice just show off their websites, was in Geneva, NY (about an hour and a half from Ithaca) at an establishment known by so many acronyms I can't possibly name it. Here is a relevant website.
Actually, the presentation today was really good. But the real reason we all made the pilgrimage was to see the germplasm collections, and the apple orchards.
A book that kept getting mentioned was The Botany Of Desire. In one chapter, the author writes about apples, the history of apples in the US, johnny appleseed's real mission, the origin of apples in kazakhstan ... and the apple orchards in Geneva. To keep the DNA of all these apples around - antique varieties, commercial varieties, the wild apples of Kazakhstan - they grow them, in orchards. Other plants, like onions and tomatoes, are kept as seeds in humidity-controlled refrigerated rooms, but apples need to be kept alive (they're propagated by grafting).
I arrived too late for the tours of the seed plants and the wild apples, but after the presentation we got to see (and taste) the domesticated apples. Some varieties were for eating and cooking; others were crab apples kept for their flowers. I made sure to bring my camera, although not all the pictures came out - it was raining, I was trying to keep my camera dry, and keep up with the tour group, and not take too long - all while munching on a Cox's Orange Pippin. :)
