Tag: dna

Mendelian Genetics Challenged

Think back to high school biology. What did you learn about? Among other things, you probably learned all about Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who experiemented with peas and formed our basic understanding of inheritance. Now, researches from Purdue University have come up with evidence that contradicts some basic rules of plant evolution formed by Mendel:

In the experiment, the Purdue researchers found that 10 percent of watercress plants with two copies of a mutant gene called “hothead” didn’t always blossom with deformed flowers like their parents, which carried the mutant genes. Instead, those plants had normal white flowers like their grandparents, which didn’t carry the hothead gene and the deformity appeared only for a single generation. The normal watercress plants with hothead genes appear to have kept a copy of the genetic coding from the grandparent plants and used it as a template to grow normally.

All I can say is “hardcore.” Makes me wonder if everything I learned about inheritance might be wrong one day, or at least fundamentally different. Details of the new experiment appear in today’s issue of Nature.

Read: Wired

New DNA with 3FB

Even thought I decided not to pursue it beyond the first level biology courses, I have a pretty strong interest in genetics. The entire topic is just curiously fascinating. I just read about some research that includes a new artificial base pair being replicated:

DNA…is a double helix formed of the base pairs of adenine and thymine (referred to as A and T for short), and of cytosine and guanine (C and G). But now, for the first time since life began, a third, artificial base pair is being replicated. The unnatural molecule is 3-fluorobenzene (3FB for short), which forms a pair with itself.

That’s pretty hardcore if you ask me. The research should help answer the question of why, in every organism, there are only two base pairs. The 3FB base pair is not yet perfect though, “A mistake typically occurs once in every 1,000 base pairs that are copied, compared with around one in 10m bases of natural DNA.”

If they can improve the copy quality, some really interesting things could be on hand:

That might help evolutionary biologists answer the question of why, for billions of years, and in every form of life on earth, only two base pairs are used. It might be that the two base-pair system is the best. Or it might be a simple accident which occurred when life began. In any case, expanding the genetic code of simple organisms could lead to radical new applications for medicine and biotechnology, and to useful information storage and retrieval systems based on DNA.

Read: Economist.com