Beneath our human foot , plants are locked in a tiresome - motion struggle for the elements necessary for endurance : water , sunlight , and nourishment . But some plant life have learned to bet on the scheme , stealing water and food from their neighbors . Some of these parasites even slip familial stuff .
A recent paperin the journal Science try out interactions between the well - analyse bloodsucking industrial plant , dodder ( Cuscuta petagona ) and two other common laboratory plants prefer by this sponger , the love apple , and Arabidopsis thaliana ( which is essentially the white mouse of the plant world ) . Dodder use specialised structures address haustoria to tap into the stem of fellow flora and extract food for thought and water . In fact , dodder canchemically senseits preferred horde plants , move toward them to form connection . Once the flora makes those haustorial connective , linking its vascular system with that of its boniface , it lease its original solution die and lives full - clock time as a sponge .
The existence of parasitic plant is well known and fairly well understood , but progressively , scientist have actualize that these haustorial connections are like flora - to - plant highways , appropriate transfer of not only nutrients and weewee , but pathogens and other speck . investigator hypothesized that these link could allow plant to directly transfer genetic material in what is termed “ horizontal factor transfer ” . Transfer of messanger RNA ( mRNA ) is of particular interest , because mRNA tells set what to do , and can impact plant maturation and Department of Defense .
scientist grant dodder to latch onto tomato and Arabidopsis , and measure the number of factor clusters that were being taken up by both the innkeeper works , and the sponge . About 24 % of dodder ’s wandering cistron clustering were observe in the host - plant ’s stem , meaning that dodder is dumping a muckle of mRNA into the host industrial plant . Dodder is also get some mRNA from its host , but at a much scummy level , and these mRNA degrade within a few hour inside the parasite .
It is currently undecipherable what exactly these transferred mRNA are doing . They may be acting sending info about the host plant back to dodder , filling it in on how healthy the plant life is , how old it is , and how stressed it is . These messenger RNA may also in a good sense “ zombify ” the industrial plant , changing the host plant ’s metabolic process or defense to make it easier for the sponge to extract food and water . Interestingly , dodder can attach to multiple metal money of plant life at once , and may actually act as a cistron - transference main road , moving gene between itself and many other boniface - plants . These interaction may basically alter the genetic code of horde plants , spur evolution .
BiologyGeneticsScience
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