plants can rewrite their own DNA

[Steve Johnson <***>]

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050321/full/050321-8.html

In a discovery that has flabbergasted geneticists,
researchers have shown that plants can overwrite the
genetic code they inherit from their parents, and
revert to that of their grandparents.

The finding challenges textbook rules of inheritance,
which state that children simply receive combinations
of the genes carried by their parents. The principle
was famously established by Austrian monk Gregor
Mendel in his nineteenth-century studies on pea
plants.

The study, published this week in Nature, shows that
not all genes are so well behaved. It suggests that
plants, and perhaps other organisms including humans,
might possess a back-up mechanism that can bypass
unhealthy sequences from their parents and revert to
the healthier genetic code possessed by their
grandparents or great-grandparents.


                
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