Twelve-year-old Della Kelly has lived her whole life in Maryville, North Carolina. But this region, which is near Darfur, is now difficult for researchers to gain access to because of violence.Where the Watermelons Grow A Washington Post KidsPost Summer Book Club Selection An Indies Introduce and Indie Next title Stared reviews from SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL, BOOKLIST, SHELF AWARENESS, and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.įans of THE THING ABOUT JELLYFISH and A SNICKER OF MAGIC will be swept away by Cindy Baldwin’s debut middle grade about a girl coming to terms with her mother’s mental illness. In the 1800s, the German botanist wrote, there were patches of the melons growing wild. It’s not clear if there are still any wild versions of the Kordofan melon or its relatives growing in Sudan, Dr. The new study found that it has different forms of genes related to disease resistance than the standard watermelon. A new color, a hardy resistance to drought or a new way to fight off blight are the kinds of treasures wild plants can bring to the gene pool of domesticated varieties.Įven varieties that are closer to the source, as the Kordofan melon may be, can help. The wild relatives of domesticated crops can be sources of fresh, interesting genes for breeders. Chomicki and his colleagues are planning to sequence the genomes of melon seeds found in African archaeological sites to try to determine where and when humans coaxed early watermelons into a more edible form. Researchers still don’t know, however, who took this wild melon ancestor and turned it into what’s on the tomb wall in Saqqara, or set it on the path to what we eat today. Farmers would have realized this melon was sweeter than others and bred it into new, tasty varieties. The Kordofan melon and the modern watermelon most likely arose from a long-ago wild melon, the results suggest. “We are really confident in saying this is the closest relative,” Dr. They found that the Kordofan melon had much more overlap with the modern variety than with the West African egusi or any other melons, suggesting that they are more closely related. To see where it fell in the watermelon family tree, the researchers behind the current paper sequenced the genomes of seven Citrullus species. That suggested it or one of its ancestors could be the source of the modern watermelon. Most members of the watermelon’s genus, Citrullus, have bitter flesh. Later, Soviet scientists wondered the same thing. In the late 1800s, a German botanist wrote that it might be a progenitor of the modern watermelon.
The Kordofan melon, which is about six inches wide, white on the inside and a pale, gently striated green on the outside, has long been grown by farmers in what is now Sudan. The discovery required digging into forgotten corners of African botany, said Guillaume Chomicki, a botanist at the University of Sheffield in England and an author of the new paper.
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