A worldwide community photographing and learning about wildlife
Project Noah Nature School
Solanum melongena var. esculendum Ichiban
Nice one in the garden. It's the Italian variety which is long and narrow like a banana. Sweet tasting and not bitter at all.
Good for a lot of dishes like my wife's Thai crispy duck breast with eggplant or stuffed with rice and chopped beef Greek style! Yum!!
Spotted on Jul 14, 2011
Submitted on Jul 14, 2011
12 Comments
Totally cool threads, articles, and information.
I have one of these Ichiban Eggplants, in my garden specifically because they slice nicely, dipped in tempura and fried. Nice with grilled or tempura shrimp, for dinner.
also thanks for the intriguing article on the photosynthetic sea slug! just amazing!
Thankyou so much for your valuable feedback. Really appreciate it!!
That article you posted, you mean? It's "Genetic similarity of eggplant shoot and fruit borer, Leucinodes orbonalis, populations." But "eggplant shoot and fruit borer" is just the common name of the insect Leucinodes orbonalis. It's not comparing an eggplant shoot and a fruit borer insect, though the title does sort of make it sound that way. The abstract explains what the study was doing, which was measuring genetic difference between populations of that insect.
It's a bit dense to read, but they're not looking at eggplants and insects, just an insect that feeds on eggplants. So there isn't genetic similarity between the two, other than the insect being able to digest parts of the eggplant.
Latimeria , isn't this article titled" Genetic similarity between eggplant and an insect?"
is there any genetic similarity between the two?
i do have another article. We had a discussion in the Freshman science class last year and have been puzzling over this for a while and am really trying to get a better understanding of it.
I made a mistake on the species for the eggplant guys and galls. The correct one is "Ichiban"..the Japanese variety.
PS the article was very informative.
Regards,
Nick
That's an interesting article Emma, but it's only looking at the genetics of an insect pest of eggplants and gene flow between populations of insects, nothing about eggplant genes. Nowhere does it talk about eggplants being more similar to animals than plants.
A better example of gene transfer between kingdoms is of sea slugs and algae: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/46/17867.... But saying that eggplants differ from all other plants is a bit misleading and disingenuous.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19715...
Very interesting things about the eggplant
latimeria,for the past several years I have read some stuff about eggplants,mushrooms and their DNA. Let me find the article. I am really interested .Will keep you informed.
Mushrooms does qualify as a fungi though.
I wouldn't say the DNA of eggplants differs that much from plants, and it certainly doesn't resemble animals more. After all, eggplants are in the same family as tobacco and tomatoes; they're much closer to those than animals.
Actually though, fungi is the kingdom that is closer evolutionarily to animals than plants.