American scientists discover an evolutionary mystery that has been 125 million years in the making

Fresh Tomato

Vegetables

United States

Innovation & Technology

Published Mar 19, 2024

Tridge summary

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have found that tomato and Arabidopsis thaliana plants use distinct regulatory systems to manage the same gene, CLV3, which can significantly increase fruit size when mutated. After creating over 70 mutant strains of these plants, they discovered that the mutations impacting fruit size were located in different parts of the gene in each plant species. This finding could enhance the predictability of crop genome engineering, providing advantages to farmers and plant breeders.

Disclaimer: The above summary was generated by a state-of-the-art LLM model and is intended for informational purposes only. It is recommended that readers refer to the original article for more context.

Original content

Plant genomics has come a long way since Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) helped sequence the first plant genome. But designing the perfect crop is still, in many ways, a game of chance. Performing the same DNA mutation in two different plants does not always provide us with the crop characteristics we want. The question is, why not? CSHL plant biologists just discovered one reason. CSHL professor and HHMI researcher Zachary Lippman and his team discovered that tomato and Arabidopsis thaliana plants can use very different regulatory systems to control the exact same gene. Incredibly, they linked this behavior to extreme genetic changes that occurred over 125 million years of evolution. Scientists used genome editing to create more than 70 mutant strains of tomato and Arabidopsis thaliana plants. Each mutation eliminated a piece of regulatory DNA around a gene known as CLV3. They then analyzed the effect each mutation had on the growth and development of the plants. When the ...

Source: InfoAgro