Plants May Be Able To Correct Mutated Genes

ddutt writes "NY Times is running a story that talks of an exciting new discovery, which, if confirmed, could represent an unprecedented exception to Mendel's laws of inheritance. The discovery involves.. 'plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.'"

Comments

Yous a vine muthafucka!

[heauxmeaux]

Back that gene up!

Parity bits?

[aristus]

ECC DNA? That's pretty damned cool. hard to believe we hadn't suspected that before.

Plant Superheroes!

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

I'm gonna start putting my cactus near my spider plant and praying for some of that mutated gene action.

OK, OK... and some hot plant-on-plant action.

OK, OK... and some hot plant-on-plant-on-me action.

Oh, that's going to be a problem

[Dark Paladin]

Odds are, now the grandparent plants are going to have to sue the grandchildren plants for having "stolen" their copyrighted and patented genetic code. As we've learned from Beatallica and Dangermouse, mixing older generations of information to recreate it anew is against the Laws of Copyright Nature.

Who gave these plants permission to make backups of their grandparents material? I mean - really!

OK - seriously, this is a fascinating idea, one that hopefully is indeed correct and can be explored. With this information, perhaps 20 years from now we can correct genetic abnormalities by having fetuses fix themselves. Kudos to the researchers for their hard work.

Re:Planet RAID.

[Savage-Rabbit]

It's just plants copying RAID or PAR files. This is nothing new - we've had those for years now.


Copying? If it bothers you so much you can always sue them for patent infringement. Of course the plants might lawyer up and come back at you claiming prior art....