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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.'"
FWIW, the paper this morning was pointing out how this discovery might leave a gaping hole in evolutionary theory. The crux of the problem is that "micro-evolution" as it were, is dependant on an organism's ability to mutate from generation to generation. If a mechanism exists that prevents or corrects mutations across generations, then the theorists may *again* have to go back to the drawing board.
:-)
Isn't it amazing how the more we know, the less we know?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Funny how this story only quotes Dr. (Bob) Pruitt. Most of this work was done by the first author Dr. (Susan) Lolle. The other two authors apart from Bob are both female. In the actual Nature article, this is reflected in the authorship credits. All of the comments in the NYT writeup are from male scientists. Why does the male scientist get nearly all the credit here? On the heels of Dr. Summers' (Harvard) comments that women are inherently less able to succeed as scientists, you would think the NYT would report this big story more carefully and give credit where credit is due.
My wife was second author on this paper, and did quite a lot of the research! I guess that blows my cover ;)
This really is no joke, these results are really exciting! I suggest everyone read the article.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I haven't bothered to register to read the article, so maybe this is discussed already: I have been told that plants (or at least some of them) have a lot of DNA due to, among other things, spurious repetitions of partial sequences. I don't have any numbers for nucleic DNA, but I think I saw somewhere examples of plants having more than 100,000 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA, compared to some 16,500 for humans. I guess those repetitions might work as a backup, and help revert an earlier mutation.
I'm not a geneticist by profession though, so what I'm telling here may be an urban legend...
My lab does research on plant genomics, and we are involved in research concerning the duplication of genes in the plant discussed in the article.Many of the genes that a plant has exist in multiple copies and that is not a new idea. We can follow the evolutionary history of these duplicated copies and show that they often arise from duplication of the entire genome followed by selective genome loss. We also frequently find that single genes are duplicated by themselves, or that entire segments of a chromosome may be duplicated by the process of 'segmental duplication'. The interesting thing here is that the scientist believe that a second copy of the gene does not exist as a DNA copy, but as an RNA copy. That is an interesting hypothesis, that will need to be explored further.
"Asleep at the switch? I wasn't asleep, I was drunk!" -- Homer
Wow, I have to say, your lack of an actual response to the very cogent parent is breathtaking.
When you see Mt. Rushmore you think of a creator, I suppose, but when you see a rock outcropping ade to look like a face by weathering you also might think of a creator. In the second case you'd be wrong.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Credit order generally boils down to:
(1) Who got the grant
(2) Who has the most tenure
(3) Who went to the meetings
(4) Who wrote the paper
(5) Whoever is politically in and most needs a paper credit to keep on tenure track
(6) etc.
Actually doing work tends to come dead last. Sometimes (as some recent scandals have shown), it doesn't come at all.
Also, realize that to a scientist, it's not about the credit for getting something done, it's about the fact that it needed to be done, and someone did it.
For every scientist popularized by the media, there are thousands of them of whom almost nobody has ever heard, but who were critically important for fundamental things we take for granted every day.
For example, some of the first posts in this thread were going on about retrying the Scopes "Monkey Trial" vs. Darwinian evolution, when most biologists today know that the currently accepted evolutionary theory is Jerry Pounelle's "Punctuated Equilibria", and Darwin is generally only taught for having come up with, and written about, the idea of change in species over time.
-- Terry