Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.j.p.

That's y-A-K-U-L-T dot-C-O-J-P.

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on YacL.

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science.

I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

Nothing says summer like a sweet ear of corn, but that treat would be much harder to eat if it weren't for a crucial mutation.

The change in just one letter of the DNA code appears to have cracked the hard casing that covered every kernel in corn's wild ancestor.

That's according to a study in the journal Genetics.

Corn was domesticated from a wild grass called Teocinti some 9,000 years ago.

But how did our ancestors make maize the agricultural marvel it is today?

Seems they selectively propagated plants with a particular mutation, one that made the kernels more accessible to hungry Homo sapiens. The researchers compared the DNA of 16

varieties of modern corn and 20 types of Teocinti, and they found a single key mutation that's

present in modern corn, but absent in its wild grass ancestor.

This genetic hiccup disrupts the activity of a protein called TGA1.

In Teocinti, the TGA1 protein directs the formation of a hard shell around every corn kernel.

But the modern maze mutation gives TGA1 a new set of marching orders. The mutant protein turns the ear

inside out, converting the seed cases into a cob that holds all the kernels in place. When the

researchers reverse the effects of the mutant protein, the ancestral seed case remnants started to

reappear. The results suggest that even minor genetic changes can lead to some pretty

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