quote: scientists say plants sometimes select better bits of DNA in order to develop normally even when their predecessors carried genetic flaws.
In the Purdue experiment, researchers found that a watercress plant sometimes corrects the genetic code it inherited from its flawed parents and grows normally like its grandparents and other ancestors.
"This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought," said Robert Pruitt, the paper's senior author.
Pruitt's team didn't find the template in the plants' DNA or chromosomes where genetic information is stored and they did not determine whether a particular gene is encoded to carry out the recovery of the normal DNA.
Wow ... I think that's pretty neat. I hope they're successful in finding out exactly where the grandparents' code is stored and how it is retrieved.
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Eh, good point. I read an article on New Scientist about this this morning, and misremembered how certain they were about it.
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