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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?
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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.
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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.
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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New Scientist has coverage. No registration required.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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sigamajig...
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
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.
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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.
Could this gene simply be more likely to mutate and it just mutates back to the normal state?
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Plants Challenge Genetic Inheritance Laws
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.
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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
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.
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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
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
A lot of genetically modified plants will be selected against where they escape into the wild. Golden Rice, for example, uses a lot of energy making Beta Carotine, that is, (from the plant's view), wasted. When its seeds get cross fertilized by wild rices the genes tend to be weeded out in the wild areas quite rapidly. Rice has generations lasting a year or less, and it's been estimated that the genes are 99% gone within 10 years. Even in cultivation, farmers have to suplement their seed stock saved from the last harvest with new purchases of fresh Golden Rice every few years to keep the yields up.
That's not mutation as you've described, it's natural and artificial selection, but so long as there are unmodifed plants in the same areas as the GE ones, it tends to work that way, as the vast majority of GE features are disadvantagious under natural selection, and a lot of them are so disadvantagious they require real rigor to preserve via artificial selection. They're like Pekinese dogs in the wild.
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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.
Evolution isn't caused by slow mutation. Darwin never said so. The main way evolution works is by reproduction and natural selection. Mutations only have a very small part to play and are in general not 'helpful'.
The reason domestic dogs, cats etc. can be distorted rapidly is by replacing the natural selection by human intervention and selecting for another goal.
Species form by separation of breeding populations when geographical boundaries are formed not by some weird slow/fast switch.
The net effect may be "fine tuning the rate" as you say. What makes this so fascinating is the mechanism is completely new.
;)
Speculating wildly, I suspect it could be more an "accident" than correction mechanism--the correct sequence may be in some RNA reservoir which occasionally gets "mistakenly" inserted in the normal reproduction process. We never noticed before, because normally the RNA sequence would complement the DNA sequence completely. But even this would be amazing, since we don't know how or when that would happen.
I can't quite figure out when this would be especially useful as a corrective mechanism; if it were actually triggered to come into play correct non-adaptive mutations a generation later, it would be mind-bogglingly huge as a discovery.
A third possibility is, of course, a misleading experimental result. That would still be interesting, but only because it made the cover of Nature
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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turns out that two wrongs DO make a right
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I did microbiology and genetics at Uni.
:-)
In bacterial cultures, it was fairly straightforward to select for resistance to a given antibiotic.
You put a bit of antibiotic into the agar, and the colonies that survive got transferred to an agar with a higher concentration of the antibiotic. And so on, until either a level was reached where none of the strains would grow, or they were completely resitant. Pretty cool stuff
By this stage, we had usually got a strain totally resistant. Then came the interesting bit.
We took the antibiotic out of the growth media, and grew several more generations. It took us quite a while, from memory, we spent a whole term working on this experiment.
At the end, we took those colonies, and put them back on several different strengths of the antibiotic. The vast majority of the colonies had lost their resistance - without a force in the environment to select for it, it was lost from teh population.
The same thing will happen for genetically engineered species, (eg roundup resistance) If there's no force in the environment to select for it, then the genes will disappear.
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In a farm setting, it might. If it would "stick" though, it would be immediate in the first generation. The only "eventually" about it would be if the trait eventually bred out.
If you keep constant pressure on them, you'll kill all non-resistant plants from the field. It's like with bacteria. As long as you keep ampicillian in the dish, they'll keep their resistance. If you stop challenging them, they'll start to lose their resistance.
If that crop got out in the wild, though, it wouldn't last long at all. Most wild plants don't get sprayed with herbicides, so they'll be wasting energy. A pesticide producing crop very well could retain their special trait in the wild. Many plant already do produce pesticides.
The reason that farmers are forbidden from using their own crop for seed isn't genetic, it's corporate. If they did use their own seed, they effectively become a competitor with the people they bought the seed from to begin with. If your customer can make the same thing you do, they'll always undersell it to themselves.