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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.'"
It's just plants copying RAID or PAR files. This is nothing new - we've had those for years now.
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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
Back that gene up!
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
ECC DNA? That's pretty damned cool. hard to believe we hadn't suspected that before.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
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.
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.
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DNA containing redundancy certainly isn't efficient, so perhaps it's something that happened *because of* evolution, and doesn't negatively impact evolutionary theory, just requires that we modify our understanding of it.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Could this some how be manipulated to work with humans as well? We could stop cancer right off, sure several disabilities in a family bloodline and so much more..
Obviously they would make a law against this though because no one wants "super humans" let alone humans without defects.
I like muppets.
Most Plant genomes are crazy complex. Besides that, polyploidy is often the norm in plant chromosomes. With that much genetic material to work with, i guess you'd be bound to find a 'do-over' someplace.
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.
back that grass up!
That's comedy GOLD!
Does that mean that the kids of two geeks will not read /. ?
Stupid NY Times. The LA Times has an article on it too available here.
So plants create restore points they can roll back to? I predict Microsoft filing suit against the plant kingdom. They've been fighting the proliferation of tree based products for years!
--
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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7185
J. Wolfgang Goerlich
This behavior can be observed in humans, too. For instance, my parents were both uncool, unintelligent jerks with no sense of humor whatsoever, and I'm an extremely hip, brilliant jerk with a great sense of humor.
Will they mutate over several seasons back towards their original form?
Maybe it's just this generation of plant obtained the ability through mutation to make genetic self backups.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
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 posted this when no replies were showing. It may be redundant, but certainly not intentionally so. Give a guy credit where it's due. I have mod points, too, and try to use them with some common sense.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
For the people who, ah, read the paper, if this particular gene (HTH) is mutated, then a whopping 5% of the second-generation genes manage to revert to the wild type. The other 95% are still mutant. So this mechanism (which is normally masked by the presence of a normal HTH gene) provides for a small number of mutant offspring to revert to wild type, so that a deleterious mutation won't completely destroy the population it occurs in. To disprove "micro-evolution", you'd have to show that this mechanism used to be turned on in every organism and operated at ~100% efficiency rather than 5%. Don't bet on it.
Now, this is definitely a pretty cool discovery, and there's going to be a stampede of people hunting around looking for some sort of, say, RNA copy of the genome hiding somewhere in Arabidopsis, and there will be a lot of fun in epigenetics. But it isn't going to destroy evolutionary theory, although I expect creationists (excuse me, "intelligent design theorists") will be running around for decades insisting that because this phenomenon exists, it's impossible for mutations to happen.
It may not be a cure for cancer, but it will allow for secure transmission of credit card data over the internet.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Before jumping to too many conclusions about this, remember that it is a report of a mutation one gene in one organism. It very well may be very specific to this particulary gene. Worthy of study. Not yet worthy of making broad conclusions.
The cake is a pie
Beware, there are pictures of MUTANT plants here. Watch out for the triffids.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
No, RAID -1
( get it? )
emt 377 emt 4
What was reported is that although there were mutations in the DNA of the plant, its siblings didn't have them anymore. The researcher said that the best theory at the moment is that the non-mutated DNA was coming from the RNA of the plant. IANAB, but I think RNA usually is though to serve only a functional "middle man" role betweeen the genetic code and the cell machinery, and not actively involved in reproduction...
He did not say that the plant was actively fixing its DNA for its offspring.
The non-mutated RNA was itself directly inherted from the parents. In a way the RNA has become a bad backup copy of the DNA. That's the present theory... I guess this is what they'll start looking for... "Bad backup copy" since still 90% of the offspring of the plant still contained the mutated DNA.
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
the invasion starts...
<oblig>I for one welcome our new florine overlords..</oblig>
-- Reality continues to ruin my life. - Calvin (Bill Watterson)
I was gonna say that, but the parent beat me to it.
how would a plant 'know' which mutations are harmful and which are beneficial?
a: it wouldn't
I knew IBM had been working on "self-healing" servers - this must be part of that research - self healing plants ;-) In the future, dual core processors will give birth to quad core processors. The ones that only give birth to three core processors will correct themselves when they breed and will have quad core offspring ;-)
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...
mutate back to the original state? could this be a possibilty at all to explain it? my knowledge of biology is limited so i have no idea
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
Doesn't this already happen in animals? e.g. Hair color in humans? Maybe it's just a recessive gene thing.
Simply because it's not a scientific theory. Science is about finding out how thinks work and you don't find out anything if you just explain causes by a higher intelligence.
It would be really cool if we could find out how to tap into similar genes in the animal kingdom--namely with humans.
It seems that at this point the science (which hasn't even been confirmed yet) is mostly 'descriptive'.
If it could get to the level of 'manipulative', that would be neat!
Imagine how many genetic diseases could be overridden (and otherwise avoided) by finding the appropriate corrective RNA gene!
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This is one of the core features of genes and gene pools. Back up, resistance to "shock" changes, etc. The fact that it happens on a mets-level is pretty much inevitable. Not that the mechanism isn't exciting, just re-inforces the basic model.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Let's see:
1. Things aren't so structured and orderly. Look at your own body. Anybody who designed such flawed systems as knee joints and eyes with blind spots ought to be fired, if not outright charged with criminal negligence. Living organisms demonstrate the slow march of blind evolution, with functions and organs being co-opted for other purposes, and not being calibrated for ultimate efficiency. As much as anything else, organisms tend to look like compromises, and not optimal designs. They certainly don't resemble entities that we observe to be designed.
2. How could science ever pursue something like "Intelligent Design"? Who is this designer? Where did they design life? What forces did it/they bring to bear? How can a researcher hope to falsify any particular claim about the designer? These are the sorts of questions that must be answered, and in reference to evidence that can actually be gathered. That is how science functions.
This sentence betrays some substantial misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Evolution is not pure chance. Mutations themselves are likely to be so, but the selective processes are not random.
As well, what does "believability" have to do with it at all? Science follows the evidence, not the conceits and sensibilities of people. Imagine going back in time 5,000 years and telling some Mesopotomian that Earth is a sphere that orbits the sun, which itself orbits the central mass of a vast galaxy with billions of stars, which in turn is itself only a rather ordinary member of a vast cluster of galaxies. That you cannot imagine (or refuse to imagine) something to occur is not an argument against it, but merely fallacious thinking.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Most Plant genomes are crazy complex. Besides that, polyploidy is often the norm in plant chromosomes. With that much genetic material to work with, i guess you'd be bound to find a 'do-over' someplace.
Exactly, and there's a reason for that crazy complexity. The core challenge for a plant is that it cannot move. It has to handle all the processes of life whilst living where ever it happened to sprout. If the sunlight is intense or shaded; if the ground is wet or dry; if a caterpillar munches on the plant; if the soil is laced with silicon or deficient in phosphorus; or whatever, the plant can't do much about it but activate/deactivate genes. As a result, they have evolved a more complex genome with a greater number of IF-THEN or CASE statements built-in.
In contrast, most animals are nicely mobile, if they don't like their environment, they move to a better location. As such animals don't need as complex a genome because they spend most of their lives in their chosen micro-climate.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
When two "little people" have children, it's not unusual for that child to be of normal height. How does what is observed in the plants differ from the anecdotal observations of a similar nature in humans? Is this exciting because the plants have been modified or selected to specifically exclude any normal-plant characteristics wheras "little people" have not been?
Can you tell that I elected to ignore all studies of biology starting at the eleventh grade?
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
Could this gene simply be more likely to mutate and it just mutates back to the normal state?
AP wire story via Yahoo. No registration required.
Plants Challenge Genetic Inheritance Laws
So are you saying is science today is the search of an explanation that excludes the possibility that there may be something out there greater than us? My biggest question about our existence is what set all that we have now in to motion?
No, i didn't say that :) I just said that this ain't the way science works. You're using occams razor and if you ever start speculation openly you usually do it in very small steps (like supposing in this case that RNA could be responsible for preserving the genetic information). Nothing stops a scientist from having a vision (like trying to prove god or something like that), but this does not make it a scientific theory.
There is no such thing as inherently "good" or "bad", to say a mutation is good or bad is to imply someone is evaluating, we know were that idea leads off to... (If we didn't have mutations, we'd all still be one-celled *g*)
No, if the offspring has a different gene than both of the parents, one must conclude that the source of the gene is not what one expected!
A present theory is that the un-mutated DNA came from the RNA of the parents. The RNA of the parent s did not (yet) contain the mutation. (Since the parents got those from the their parents).
It was also said that still 90% of the offspring contained the mutated genes. That means the parents RNA only sometimes had influence... (IANAB)
So, the theory is testing the idea that the RNA could be serving an additional role as a bad backup copy of the DNA.
In a way you could call this meddling of the grandparents in the parents lives, "telling" them how to raise their children, heh heh
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sigamajig...
If the grandparents had a backup, why didn't the parents correct themselves?
Are we sure it didn't just mutate back?
ROTFL... I found it pretty funny. Though it was a bit tough to explain the humor to my wife.. :)
What if the "mutation" is actually an environment-based evolutionary adaptation instead?
I'm also not a biologist (my official education is in History), but this article just shows to me how Wikipedia can be addictive. I went there the other day looking for something about the Battle of Covadonga and went on clicking... after 4 hours I was reading about reverse transcripase, RNA world theory, DNA unwiding and MRSA. This is related to your post in that I found that RNA is apparently not only a middle-man - as in mRNA - as I expected. There are living organisms that have RNA as their genetic foundation, and from several articles I was surprised with the suspected and known functions of RNA which I didn't knew about.
This post isn't informative, insightful or informative in what relates to the topic, just an advise to fellow biology-ignorant slashdotters t browse Wikipedia on the subject... absolutly amazing topic for people like me with only a superficial understanding of it. Start here and you'll be addicted.
Understood.
I've always thought it was presumptuous for biologists to declare that "95% of our DNA is junk that serves no purpose."
No purpose that you know of, yet.
I've always thought that "junk DNA" might just contain error-correcting algorithms, encoded backup copies, checksums, and stuff like that. Today I feel pretty vindicated.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Not all genes are in the chromosomes, sometimes they're in Plasmids, especially with plants - or in humans, some of your DNA isn't in your chromosomes, they're in your Mitochondrial structures, hence you inherit them from your mother.
However, a good controlled experiment should be able to rule this out, and I'm sure we'll all be talking about this in Biochem labs here at the UW this week.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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
Dude - I'm not arguing for "Intelligent Design", but have you never seen so-called "cruft" in source code of years-old systems? Would you try to argue that such source code must have evolved itself through exposure to an invisible and external-to-the-source-code neural-net (i.e. dumb automaton that just keeps trying stuff until it finds things that work better than before even if sub-optimal) because any developer who wrote crap like that would have been fired after the first dozen sub-optimal changes?
... wake up and learn to really (i.e. "critically") think instead of just parroting back what somebody told you to believe!
Something as bad as the Windows source code could only have happened by accident, right?
Jeez
The evolution of sexual reproduction is what is brought into question *not* evolution. A major impetus for the evolution of sexual reproduction is the advantage of getting a good copy of a gene to replace a damaged one when you exchange DNA by sex. The prospect of RNA backup copies makes this a bit more complicated since there would be less need for sex to repair the DNA. This is discussed a bit in the article - and they imply that the RNA backup system (if it exists) may be prevalent in organisms that primarily reproduce asexually and thus have a greater need for such a repair system.
:-)
It doesn't invalidate anything and does not bring evolution into question. And, FYI, scientists are always at the drawing board - as working on theories as they "evolve" to reflect new data.
Isn't it amazing how less we know, the less we know?
Since I know from experience that sand castles are designed by people, when I see one on the beach, simple deductive reasoning allows me to say "That's very likely designed." In other words, your analogy is flawed, as all such watchmaker analogies are, at their very core. Beyond that, in the sciences that do deal with intelligence design (archaeology and forensics come to mind), a good deal of effort has to be put into showing that certain processes or artifacts are, in fact, the products of an intelligent designer. I personally could walk through a field strewn with Acheulian tools and not recognize them as being the product of an intelligent mind.
I don't see this at all. The more we observe the world revealed by genetics, the more we observe the messiness of evolution, viral sequences in our genome, genes that are minimally active leading to primates like ourselves being unable to produce sufficient Vitamin C, thus requiring us to gain it in our foods. Simply waving your hands and saying "it's structured" doesn't really say anything at all, and is simply another demonstration of your fallacious thinking.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The source on this article isn't the New York Times, nor as suggested the LA Times or New Scientist, but Nature (vol 434, p 505 - subscription only)
Look up "Null Hypothesis" in your nearest statistics textbook.
the paper this morning was pointing out how this discovery might leave a gaping hole in evolutionary theory.
...bzzt and INSULT your ... m.M.M.m.mother bzzt *boom*
Wha??? Evolution...gaping hole...? Err uh bzztt *poof* Slashbot brain cannot compute result. You must be a Jeeeeeeezus person.. er bzztt *crash* boing bzzt must POST ANONYMOUSLY
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
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
Here's the issue of Nature. You can access the full article text if you've got a University connection or something.
I'm a little bit surprised that it seems to work only in 1 out of 10 cases. If there really is a backup and a way of transmitting genetic information without DNA i think it should be optimized by now to work in most cases and not that rarely. This sounds to me a little bit like finetuning the mutation rate at he positions after the decimal point.
Why it so unacceptable to introduce the idea of "Intelligent Design" when everything about life is so structured and orderly?
No after market support from the manufacturer?
-- Terry
The more macro or micro you look at it, the *less* structure and order you see. A sandcastle has no internal structure whatsoever. And a macro view of the entire beach would show far more chaotic disorder than structure.
Until you got very micro--then you'd see crystal structure and atomic order *as described by science.* Or until you got very macro--then you'd see astronomical structure and order *as described by science.*
Science goes beyond the mere recognition of structure and order, to read, understand, and predict, at a detailed level, what exactly the structure and order is.
Not only is order and structure expected according to our most current scientific understanding of the world and universe, it conforms very closely to the scientific theories we have formulate to describe the structure and order.
Besides, structure and order in and of themselves mean nothing to your argument. You're ASSUMING that structure and order can only arise from intelligence. To apply your way of thinking, what you would need to prove is that such structure and order could *only* arise through intelligent design. Good luck with that one.
Incorrect. Try "Maybe, but probably not."
The first question is whether this happens in human DNA. Then the second question would be, if the first answer is positive, is there any way to ensure that it occurs? It occurred very rarely in the plants, which ain't a good sign. Third, is there a way to take advantage of it even if it could be made reliable?
That's a lot of ifs. People get Nobel Prizes for such ifs. People also spend their entire lives doing such research and come up with crapola.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
there goes cowboy neals' excuse ...
Pictochat Art!!!
(archaeology and forensics come to mind), a good deal of effort has to be put into showing that certain processes or artifacts are, in fact, the products of an intelligent designer. I personally could walk through a field strewn with Acheulian tools and not recognize them as being the product of an intelligent mind.
Big truth, in my first archaeology classes I was asked to pick several "artifacts" and select those that might be "interesting" (read, man made) and those that weren't.
I - and everyone else - got it wrong, it's very, very hard many times (especially when we are talking about the very begining) to even consider a formless piece of rock as something carved by Man, and very tempting to see some kind of purpose in what is the result of erosion.
The good news for ID people is that the Earth for them probably didn't exist at the time-frame we are talking, so no need to put a lot of work at making the distinction.
While the religious side of me revels in the prospect that evolution may be proved impossible, the scientific side looks to the larger picture.
The Darwinian view of evolution through slow mutation was proved wrong long ago by the fossil record. This knowledge has been closely held for fear the press would get ahold of it and have a field day. But based on the fossil record, it appears that evolution only happens when small populations are isolated and run short on resources.
THERFORE - it is easy to theorize that genes have (at least) two maintenance modes programmed into them: ONE- we're thriving in a time of abundance - keep things from changing by repairng mistakes; TWO- We're dying off due to hostil conditions - quick, mutate and try to find a way to cope with this. This is why breeders can cause dogs, cats, birds, plants, to change into such bizarre forms in a few generations by breeding offspring back with parents - it simulates a dying population, and activates the evolve to escape mechanism.
This evolutionary ability must itself have had to develop by the slow route, which is why life developed so little diversity for the first few hundred million years. But then, once the evolutionary mechanism was created - it kicked in and species began springing up all over the place.IMHO anyway
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
If there's a way to only turn on the backup if the organism isn't doing well, you could get a racheting effect, favoring positive mutations and limiting the damage from negative mutations. But it's too early to tell.
DNA is full of all sorts of multiple copies of seemingly usless rubbish (tails in humans, the way flatfish bend into shape). It doesn't all get cleaned up in each duplication. What people don't always understand is that DNA is both the code and the copier. Mutations can change either the code controlling replication or the code for 'normal' purposes or both.
All that's happend here is the code for copying has mutated to make two copies of a gene and another mutation in has made the plant use the non-stuffed up copy of the gene.
yeah, but do they boot linux?
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
In every one of you guys (and I do mean guys) is an nifty gene backup mechanism: the Y chromosome. Most of it is made up of gene palindromes.
I meant Gould. I am absolutely terrible with names.
When I mentioned the references to Scopes, of course it was with regard to the mechanics as they were understood directly from Darwin's writings, which meant his understanding of them.
Pushing a non-scientific position is always all about intentionally picking an already discredited theory as a whipping boy, and then citing the evidence that was used to discredit it.
-- Terry
It's been known for decades that baker's yeast have the ability to fix mutated sex determining genes via exchange with an intact "cryptic" copy. The mechanism has been worked out in extreme detail. I don't think anyone ever thought they were the only organism that could do this . . . I guess it's nice to have proof, though.
Do they know what protein the gene in question codes for?
Is it possible that some similar protein is doing the same job, or some mechnism "patching" the defective protein? That is, are the "normalised" plants using the same mechanism to produce the same effect?
An interesting fact that none of the news articles mention is the fact that Bob (Dr. Pruitt) was the one who first suggested using Arabidopsis as the model organism for plants. Now you Know! (tm)
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
But Intelligent Design isn't really about that anyways. Its essence is nothing more than "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution". It's simply about disguising the obvious theological aspects of Creationism behind the guise of pseudo-science. The ID advocates change their tune depending upon the audience. To critics, the Intelligent Designer could be an alien race. To the Creationists, of course, they don't try to hide the fact that the Intelligent Designer is the Biblical God. It's the fundemental deceit of the movement that it's real interest isn't furthering knowledge, but trying to force science away from following lines of evidence that they believe questions their religious beliefs.
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I've always thought it was presumptuous for biologists to declare that "95% of our DNA is junk that serves no purpose."
It's actually 70% of the human genome which is junk DNA. And that 70% is actually really just junk. It's from retrotransposons (LINE (long-interspersed genetic element), if you want to look it up) that jump in and out of the genome at will throughout the genome. There are some bits of retrovirus in there as well, but it's predominantly retrotransposons.
It's just junk. It's that simple.
We've always wondered at the huge amount of apparently nonsense data in the intron segments, which also seems to contain portions of valid genes. Maybe it's a form of backup?
The finding poses a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it corrects mutations, which evolution depends on as generators of novelty. Dr. Meyerowitz said he did not see this posing any problem for evolution because it seems to happen only rarely. "What keeps Darwinian evolution intact is that this only happens when there is something wrong," Dr. Surridge said.
I've read enough of your posts to guess you didn't mean to suggest this "gaping hole" in evolutionary theory implies that creationism is a better alternative, but do watch your rhetoric. This is a violation of Mendel's laws of inheritance, but Mendel was just a monk growing peas. Biology is mind-bogglingly complex. There are so many biological checks and balances, circular pathways, regulator proteins (and proteins that regulate the regulator proteins). If the article had a little more meat regarding the "hothead" gene in question, this would be more interesting. How much different was the mutated protein from the wildtype? If it was just a single base difference, there could have been ten different ways the mutation was repaired. If there were several amino acids difference in the final protein sequence, that would be much more exciting. Okay, after a bit of research I can answer my own question:
A plant repairing a single base mutation isn't that surprising at all, especially if the mutation made the DNA twist into some funky unstable form, while the wild-type DNA forms neat and thermodynamically stable loops. They may have already considered that.Incidentally, it is much easier than I once thought to create a functional protein from scratch, if you know what you're doing. This guy at Princeton, who gave a seminar at my workplace recently, created proteins made of four alpha helices just by varying the amino acids by polarity. And the most surprising part is that some of these de novo proteins have enzymatic activity! Some can bind to heme and then act as peroxidases. Some act as esterases. It was suggested that perhaps primordial proteins were highly non-specific, or multi-functional, and only later evolved specificity.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
turns out that two wrongs DO make a right
Jeremy Logan's Website.
Probably a Freudian slip. I love hothouse vegetables.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
When it comes to silly names, I'm a fan of the hedgehog genes: Desert, Indian and Sonic hedgehog.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Grabbed this URL from the RSS feed which naturally bypasses the NYTimes requirement to devulge your personal information. Not sure why they keep posting links to NYTimes without finding the pain-free links that are in the RSS feeds.
e .h tml?ex=1269234000&en=00306bf37c75a71b&ei=5088&part ner=rssnyt
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/science/23gen
After submitting this very same NY Times story myself
This seems to happen every time I submit !?
What gives? I give up. No more stories for you Slashdot. (Apparently Taco and Timothy would rather post themselves...)
Pthpth & kiss my ass.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
To the mutant threat, professor x will never see it coming! mwahahahhaha!!!
I don't remember, but did the radiation from the disaster effect the plants at all? If so, does this mean that the future plants will be back to normal?
"Evolutionary theory" predates mendelian genetics and is not dependent on it. Mendelian genetics is simply the best available explanation for how evolution happens and the one best supported by evidence to have actually occurred.
There is no such thing as "microevolution". It's a term invented by people trying to reconcile theology with science, has no definition which is either consistently applied or consistent with any sort of evidentially grounded theory, and has no place in a non-theological discussion. I'm sure there are better terms for whatever it was you were actually trying to express.
The existence of a process which inhibits mutations does not "leave a gaping hole in" or even realistically impact the ability of mendelian genetics to explain even what you call "microevolution", as long as there is some process somewhere by which alleles may be accidentally altered, ever. Okay, so there's a mechanism which may in some species under some circumstances correct "errors"? What if the error corrector makes an error???
Uncovering contradictions in the operation of a scientific theory is an indication of flawed theory existing somewhere. However uncovering facts which complicate how that theory applies to the real world is an indication of a strong theory, because they show the theory is robust enough to accommodate complicating factors without breaking down into contradictions or epicycles. Uncovering complications in a theory's applications, as this paper uncovers complications in the mechanics of genetics as we know them, is a good thing because it means our understanding of how "stuff" operates has been tested and expanded; a theory whose applicability to the real world is not constantly being tested is a theory which perhaps cannot be trusted. Unfortunately the press, aided by a rather decent-sized faction of persons who actively wish to attack the idea of science, seems to often interpret such events as if they were a problem. It becomes difficult to meaningfully explain science to the public in such an environment, where positive events for scientific understanding necessary to the operation of the scientific process itself are so frequently popularly interpreted as negative events which cast doubt on the results of the scientific process.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
How will this discovery impact phylogentics which reconstructs evolutionary TREE?
We are having a cycle here!
This is just a journalist reporting for the New York times. I look forward to reading about this if it makes it to nature.
Sex was developed to maintain established genes, NOT to "mix genes up" as some people mistakenly assert. Sex is anti-mutational. Homologous recombination's magic is that it favors the reproduction of "known" sequences.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom