Date: 20/02/2019 15:48:15
From: PermeateFree
ID: 1349096
Subject: Genes may travel from plant to plant to fuel evolution

>>The evolution of plants and animals generally has been thought to occur through the passing of genes from parent to offspring and genetic modifications that happen along the way. But evolutionary biologists from Brown University and the University of Sheffield have documented another avenue, through the passing of genes from plant to plant between species with only a distant ancestral kinship.<<

>>“What is so exciting here is that these genes are moving from plant to plant in a way we have not seen before,” said Erika Edwards, assistant professor of biology at Brown and the second author on the paper. “There is no host-parasite relationship between these plants, which is usually what we see in this kind of gene movement.”

Scientists call this evolutionary event “lateral gene transfer.” The question, then, how are the plants passing their genes? The best guess at this point is that genetic material carried airborne in pollen grains land on a different species and a small subset of genes somehow get taken up by the host plant during fertilization. Such “illegitimate pollination events,” as Edwards described it, have been seen in the laboratory. “There are reproductive mishaps that occur. In some cases, these could turn out to be highly advantageous,” she said.<<

https://phys.org/news/2012-02-genes-fuel-evolution.html#nRlv

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