researchers Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory We discovered two distantly related model plants. Arabidopsis And tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum), very different control systems can be used to control the exact same gene. Incredibly, scientists have linked this behavior to extreme genetic modifications that occurred over the course of 125 million years of evolution.
Function of CLV3 in Arabidopsis And in tomato, the cis-regulatory sequences are conserved despite extreme divergence.Image credit: Shiren other., doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1011174.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientist Daniel Siren and his colleagues used genome editing to create more than 70 mutant strains of tomato and Arabidopsis plants.
Due to each mutation, CLV3.
The researchers then analyzed how each mutation affected plant growth and development.
when DNA is stored CLV3 Check-in has mutated too much and the fruit has grown explosively.
“CLV3 It helps in the normal development of plants,” Dr. Shiren said.
“If the switch hadn't been turned on at exactly the right time, the plant would have looked completely different.”
“None of the fruits are huge and ideal. You have to balance growth and yield.”
“If you only have two giant tomatoes on a plant, is that as beneficial as a reduced yield?”
“There are no easy solutions. When you try to improve something, you always end up sacrificing something.”
In the case of tomatoes, mutations occur near the beginning, but not at the end. CLV3 Genetics had a dramatic effect on fruit size.
for Arabidopsisthe regions surrounding both parts of the gene had to be destroyed.
This suggests that something happened over the past 125 million years that caused plants to evolve differently. What exactly happened remains a mystery.
“We can't go back to our common ancestors because they no longer exist,” Dr. Siren says.
“So it's hard to say what the original conditions were and how they were mixed together.”
“The simplest explanation is that there is a regulatory element that is conserved to some degree, and that is being changed in a subtle way. That's a little unexpected.”
“What is certain is that gene regulation is not uniform across plant species.”
“Uncovering these genetic differences could help make crop genome engineering more predictable.”
“And that would be a huge win not only for science, but also for farmers and plant breeders around the world.”
of study Published in a magazine PLoS Genetics.
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D.Siren other. 2024. Extreme reorganization of cis-regulatory regions controlling deeply conserved plant stem cell regulators. PLoS Genet 20 (3): e1011174; doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1011174
Source: www.sci.news
