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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
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.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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.
New Scientist has coverage. No registration required.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7185
J. Wolfgang Goerlich
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!
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....
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
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...
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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.
Who is John Cabal?