NYT: Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene(evolution question)

[DeepModem Mom]

Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene
By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: March 23, 2005


In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found 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.

The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.

The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system.

"It looks like a marvelous discovery," said Dr. Elliott Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, described the finding as "a really strange and unexpected result," which would be important if the observation holds up and applies widely in nature.

The result, reported online yesterday in the journal Nature by Dr. Robert E. Pruitt, Dr. Susan J. Lolle and colleagues at Purdue, has been found in a single species, the mustardlike plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists. But there are hints that the same mechanism may occur in people, according to a commentary by Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Weigel describes the Purdue work as "a spectacular discovery."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/science/23gene.html

[DireStrike]

1. Lets hope the same thing happens with Monsanto's "die after 1 crop" plants

nt

[Dogmudgeon]

4. You mean their "Suicide Crops"?

A.K.A. "Suicide Food".

That would be a good seed to plant in the mind of the Media.

--p!

[Quakerfriend]

5. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking

and all the species/organisms that have their original genetic make up tainted by GE crops.

[jayctravis]

2. Praise Jesus!

I'm sure Fundies will insist God did it. The biological system that did this can be a metaphor for a supreme being.

Science celebrates the complex miraculous world we live in, whether intelligently designed, or spooged from a big bang.

[Kagemusha]

3. Shades of Jurassic Park's frog DNA.

Yeah well, scientists shouldn't be so startled, IMHO..

[leveymg]

6. If America were only as smart as a mustard plant, we'd be rid of Shrub.

Any backup genetic memory of an era of peace, equality and freedom still out here?

:think:

[KittyWampus]

7. More Likely, The Genetic Memory Exists On A Plane Independant Of

the Physical Plane and the DNA strands that can be seen with the physical eye.

In other words, there's more to Life than the Physical World.

Intelligence and Information form the basis/root for Physical Form and NOT the other way around.

So many things make so much more sense when you proceed from that proposition.

It is unnecessarily complex to consider Reality stemming from the Physical.

[VegasWolf]

11. There YA go! As soon as an unknown transference mechanism

comes along, then just because we don't yet understand it, it must be some will of god. To paraphrase the Catholic Church liturgy, "As it
was it the beginning, and has been since the time of Galileo and
Darwin, so shall it ever be."

[reprobate]

13. Please provide a mechanism for that 'Intelligence and Information'.....

....to effect change in the physical world. Also please show how that statement can be falsified.


And as an aside, why do you have the sign of Apollo in your post?

[hunter]

8. Comparing genes to computer programs can be deceptive.

The genes as "blueprints" analogy is just as bad.

It's becoming very clear that life on earth has evolved various means of evolving -- that there are mechanisms in life's toolkit that make the process of evolution more effective. Organisms that can quickly "evolve" when they are faced with some sort of environmental stress are more likely to survive than those organisms which cannot.

At first we thought evolution was a process where essentially random mutations were simply selected for or against, a process of "natural selection" that was easily explained using our "genes as computer programs" analogies. Genes that are not benificial are weeded out of a population, genes that are benificial are reproduced.

The next step in our understanding of the process was to see genes as chunks of code that could be duplicated and shuffled around into new, more competitive configurations, and this model led to a much more sophisticated understanding of natural selection.

But such models do not explain everything.

What we are seeing now is that this duplication and shuffling of genes, along with the sorting and collection of "random" mutations, is somehow a contolled process. Duplications, shufflings, and mutations of genes that are unlikely to be useful to an organism's descendents are somehow suppressed, perhaps through various unknown mechanisms as described in the research posted above.

Before anyone jumps in at this point claiming to see some "Invisible Hand of God" in the process, that's not what I'm talking about. The mechanism for these processes are unkown but not supernatural.

As always, we discover life's toolkit to be much more sophisticated than we thought it was...

[ihelpu2see]

9. This is not so incredible. mRNA stores a complete genetic sequence

and it is not DNA. Granted Mitochondria are not in plants but, there is an analogous structure....

[HereSince1628]

10. No mitochondria in plants?

Are you sure?

[Emillereid]

12. Life is intelligent!

I love it when nature throws us a curve-ball!