Re: plants can rewrite their own DNA

[Steve Johnson <***>]

Sorry. I did not realize Judith had already posted
this.

- Steve

--- Steve Johnson <***> wrote:
>
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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