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Friday, April 1, 2005 |
In a puzzling new study that destabilizes conventional knowledge on genetic inheritance, researchers have found that organisms can actually reject the genetic code they inherit from their parents and replace it with that of their grandparents.
Published in the March 24 issue of Nature, an online scientific journal, the study shows that plants (particularly) and possibly other organisms, including humans, may possess an ability to control for healthier genes by replacing unhealthy sequences with stronger genes — in some cases, from their not-so-immediate forebears.
“This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought in the past,” said Robert Pruitt, head of the study and a molecular geneticist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. “While Mendel’s laws ... are fundamentally correct, they’re not absolute.”
Pruitt and his colleagues found that in spite of two copies of malformed genes in parent Arabidopsis plants, they could still produce offspring that expressed the healthier traits of their grandparents and even great grandparents. Mendelian laws have stipulated that offspring inherit their parents’ mutations.
“If the inheritance mechanism we found in the research plant Arabidopsis exists in animals too,” said Pruitt, “it’s possible that it will be an avenue for gene therapy to treat or cure diseases in both plants and animals.”
—Toyin Adeyemi
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