Plants can correct genetic errors

Upending prevailing genetic theory, a team of scientists at Purdue University has discovered a mechanism in plants that allows them to corre...

Upending prevailing genetic theory, a team of scientists at Purdue University has discovered a mechanism in plants that allows them to correct defective genes from their parents by tapping into an ancestral data bank of healthy genetic material.

In essence, the plants back up the evolutionary path and use past genes to restore traits that would otherwise be lost, according to a study published Tuesday in the online version of the journal Nature.

The finding proposes 8216;8216;an extraordinary view of inheritance,8217;8217; the scientists said in their paper. The mechanism appears to be a way for self-fertilizing plants, which are more likely to suffer from the negative consequences of inbreeding, to maintain a healthy level of genetic diversity and increase their chances of survival. It could also be a way for plants to adapt to changing environmental conditions by having a store of diverse traits at their disposal.

The proposal offers a radical addition to the widely embraced laws of Mendelian genetics, which date back to the mid-1800s. They hold that plants and animals inherit only two copies of a gene 8212;8212; one from each parent. If both copies were defective, a plant would have no ability to correct the error. 8216;8216;This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought in the past,8217;8217; said Robert Pruitt, a molecular geneticist who co-authored the paper. 8216;8216;While Mendel8217;s laws that we learned in high school are still fundamentally correct, they8217;re not absolute.8217;8217;

The scientists happened upon their discovery by accident. They were intending to study a deformed version of the Arabidopsis plant, a member of the mustard family. Their particular variety produced flowers that were fused into tight balls, a consequence of the plants8217; having two defective copies of a gene dubbed 8216;8216;hothead8217;. Breeding the plants should produce only offspring that are also deformed. But the scientists found that 10 per cent of the offspring produced normal flowers that radiated out from the centre of a cluster. 8212;Los Angeles Times/LAT-WP

And elephants can mimic

LONDON: Elephants have an unusual ability to mimic and learn new sounds which may be a form of acoustic communication.

Birds, bats, primates and marine mammals do it but Joyce Poole, of Amboseli Elephant Research in Nairobi, Kenya, said it is the first time the trait has been found in the huge mammals.

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She and her team recorded a 10-year-old female named Mlaika who imitated truck sounds. She lived in a group of orphaned elephants in Tsavo, Kenya. Her night stockade was 3 km from the highway. She mimicked the truck sounds after sunset, the optimal time for transmission of low-frequency sounds in savannahs. 8212;Reuters