What's up with the BIBAC?

"Petunia: Evolutionary, Developmental and Physiological Genetics" is a technical, super-scientific monograph on petunias, a genus of flowering plants mostly known for its colourful garden varieties. The two authors are members of something called Petunia Platform, an almost "Masonic" little club of petunia-oriented scientists in the Netherlands. If you're not a member of the fraternity, you will probably don't understand much of this volume!

To quote one of the abstracts: "In plants the enzymes pyruvate decarboxylase and alcohol dehydrogenase are generally associated with the alcoholic fermentation pathway, producing a diffusible non-acidic, and relatively non-toxic end-product for anaerobic glycolysis while generating a small amount of NAD+ and ATP". Should it be shaken but not stirred?

You also better learn the meaning of home grown abbreviations such as AFLP (Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism), AFBA (After Flower Bud Appearance), BHLH (Basic Helix-Loop-Helix), BIBAC (Binary Bacterial Artificial Chromosome)...well, I could go on for half an hour. My favourite is PVX, which means Potato Virus X. Oh, that one. One abbreviation sounds like a troll joke from the editors: TUNEL, which supposedly means Terminal Transferase-mediated dUTP nick end-labeling. Really? Are you absolutely sure?

As behoves a super-scholarly work of this kind, the references are to *very* obscure publications, including "Festschrift for William G. Darcy: The Legacy of a Taxonomist", published by Missouri Botanical Gardens Press. Or what about an article by Spegazzini from 1897 published in the La Plata-based journal "Revista de la Facultad de Agronomía y Veterinaria". I suppose an article on arbuscular mycorrhiza in "Nature" is somewhat less obscure...

If you are so obsessed with petunias that you just want to know everything about their molecular structure (or arbuscular mycorrhiza), then I suppose Tom Gerats and Judy Strommer just made your day, but the rest of us frankly prefer just watching the flowers in the garden! :D