The breakthrough will aid in the development of heat-tolerant crops and the manufacture of algal biofuels.
Plants, like all other living things, use DNA to pass on their properties. Animal genetics normally focuses on parentage and lineage, but this may be difficult in plant genetics since plants, unlike most animals, can be self-fertile.
Many plants have special genetic abilities that facilitate speciation, such as being polyploidy tolerant. Plants are unique in that they can produce energy-dense carbohydrates through photosynthesis, which is carried out by chloroplasts. Chloroplasts contain their own DNA, allowing them to act as a reservoir for genes and genetic variation, as well as adding a depth of genetic complexity not observed in mammals. Plant genetic research, despite its difficulties, has enormous economic ramifications. Many crops may be genetically engineered to boost production and nutritional value while also gaining resistance to pests, herbicides, and diseases.
Genes hold all of an organism's instructions for survival, development, and reproduction. However, there is a big difference between discovering a gene and knowing what it does. Many genes have inexplicable instructions, and scientists don't know what they do. UC Riverside, Princeton University, and Stanford University recently published a study that revealed the activities of hundreds of genes in algae, some of which are also found in plants. The innovation will help scientists develop climate-resistant agricultural crop kinds and genetically alter algae for biofuel generation.
“Plant and algae genetics are understudied. These organisms make the foods, fuels, materials, and medicines that modern society relies on, but we have a poor understanding of how they work, which makes engineering them a difficult task,” said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering at UC Riverside. “A common way to learn more about biology is to mutate genes and then see how that affects the organism. By breaking the biology we can see how it works.”
Using algal mutants and automated technologies, the researchers ran tests that generated millions of data points. By examining these datasets, the researchers were able to discover the functional role of hundreds of poorly described genes and discover numerous novel roles for previously recognized genes. Photosynthesis, DNA damage response, heat stress response, toxic chemical reaction, and algal predator response are all regulated by these genes.
Several of the genes found in algae have plant equivalents with similar functions, indicating that the algal data can aid scientists in understanding how those genes operate in plants.
High-throughput technologies, which automate the analysis of tens of thousands of mutants fast, are commonly employed in model systems like yeast and bacteria to investigate gene function on a genome-wide scale. This is a more effective and time-saving method than examining each gene separately. Crop plants, on the other hand, do not respond well to high-throughput approaches due to their bigger size and the difficulties of evaluating thousands of plants.
