Arabidopsis surprise

[eub]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/science/23gene.html

In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.
[...]
As part of the project, they were studying plants with a mutated gene that made the plant's petals and other floral organs clump together. Because each of the plant's two copies of the gene were in mutated form, they had virtually no chance of having normal offspring.

But up to 10 percent of the plants' offspring kept reverting to normal. Various rare events can make this happen, but none involve altering the actual sequence of DNA units in the gene. Yet when the researchers analyzed the mutated gene, known as hothead, they found it had changed, with the mutated DNA units being changed back to normal form.

Comments

[eub.livejournal.com]

(Nature article here if anyone's a subscriber. (Was there a more efficient way to find this than to go to nature.com, find the press release about this article, pick the DOI out of its bibliography, and paste it into doi.org?))

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I like how the mutated gene is known as "hothead".

[crucible.livejournal.com]

OK, fine. I admit it. I amde the genes revert to their non-mutated state. Happy now?