A new understanding about the genetics of thale cress was led by studying the genome. The Pdraic Flood is a credit.
The University of California, Davis, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology have found that a simple roadside weed may be the key to understanding and predicting genetic changes.
The findings, published January 12 in the journal Nature, could change our understanding of evolution and help researchers breed better crops or even help humans fight cancer.
A new variation is created when DNA is damaged. The scientists wanted to know if there was a random nature to it. They found something that was unexpected.
Grey Monroe, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, is the lead author on a paper about the genetics of plants. It turns out that the way in which the plant is affected is not random. It's a completely new way of thinking.
The thale cress is a small flowering weed with a relatively small genome of 120 million base pairs. Humans have roughly 3 billion base pairs.
Monroe said it's a model organism for genetics.
Plants grown in a lab can have many variations.
Plants with defects that may not have survived in nature were able to survive in a protected lab environment at the start of work.
More than 1 million genes were found in the hundreds of plants. A nonrandom pattern was revealed within those changes.
"We found that the theory of random and natural selection were not the same as we had thought," said the senior author on the study.
They found patches of the genome that were not random. They were surprised to discover that there was an over-representation of essential genes in those patches.
Monroe said that these are the important regions of the genome. The areas that are the most important are the ones that are protected from change.
The areas are sensitive to the effects of new genes. "Repairing DNA damage seems to be particularly effective in these regions," he said.
The plant evolved to protect itself.
The scientists found that the way in which the DNA was wrapped around different types of proteins was a good indicator of whether a gene would change or not. It gives us a good idea of what's going on because we can predict which genes are more likely to change.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was changed by the findings because it shows that the plant has evolved to protect its genes from being damaged.
The plant has evolved a way to protect its most important places. We could use these discoveries to think about how to protect our genes.
Future uses.
Knowing why some parts of the genome change more than others could help breeders. The information could be used to better predict or develop new treatments for diseases that are caused by genes.
The paper concludes that the discoveries yield a more complete account of the forces driving patterns of natural variation, and they should inspire new avenues of theoretical and practical research on the role of mutation in evolution.
The Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis has a co-author in Marie Klein. The research was done by researchers from the Carnegie Institute for Science, the University of Montpellier, the College of Charleston, and the South Dakota State University.
Natural selection is reflected in the Mutation bias in Nature. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04269-6
Nature journal information.
The study challenges the evolutionary theory that DNAmutations are random.
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