Revealing the ancient secret of tomatoes
The ancient secret of the tomato has been revealed.
Scientists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have deciphered the complex genetic differences in tomato plants and mouse ear buds.
According to ISNA, plants also have genetic evolution like humans, and in this case they are completely unique.
Researchers at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have discovered something that takes more than 125 million years to occur and shows the complexities of plant genetics.
This may be the key to understanding how genes are regulated in plants. In general, the importance of this issue is that we can completely engineer a crop with a better understanding of plant genetics. For example, plant genomics has evolved significantly since the laboratory played an important role in sequencing the first plant genome. However, trying to manipulate crop traits through DNA mutations is still challenging.
The researchers focused their efforts on understanding why the same DNA mutations in different plants did not consistently produce desired crop traits.
Using the examples of tomato plants and Arabidopsis thaliana, they were able to realize that the key lies in the diverse regulatory systems employed by the same gene. The heart of this study revolves around the CLV3 gene.
Scientists used new genome editing methods to create more than 70 mutant strains of both tomato plants and mouse ears. Each DNA mutation targets a setting around the CLV3 gene. This allowed researchers to observe its effects on plant growth and development.
Surprisingly, the study showed that these two plant species use very different regulatory systems to control the same gene. This difference is related to the modification and improvement of the genetic process that has developed during 125 million years of evolution.
Danielle Ciren, a graduate student in the Cold Spring Harbor School of Life Sciences who led the study, emphasized the importance of CLV3 in normal plant development.
He explains: If this gene was not activated at the exact time, the plants would look very different. All fruits were large and not ideal. Common ancestors cannot be looked at because they no longer exist. So it's hard to say what the initial state of plants was and how everything came together.
The simplest explanation is that there is a regulatory element that has been preserved in some capacity and changed in subtle ways that are a bit unexpected.
The complex balance between growth and performance poses a challenge for product engineers. Siren noted this dilemma. Obtaining improved traits often involves sacrificing other plant traits, he said.
This study showed that mutations near the beginning of the CLV3 gene for tomato significantly affect its size. In contrast, mouse ear development required disruptions in both parts of the gene. This is a clear sign of divergence in evolutionary paths.
The implications of this research are very broad. Understanding the non-uniformity in genetic regulation among plant species can change our approach to genome engineering of agricultural crops so that we can better predict it.
