Some Plants Steal Useful Genetic Resources from Their Neighbours

Grasses and plants from which we get our wheat, rice, barley etc., are quite smart in acquiring skills for their survival. Now, scientists have found that various grass types could acquire genetic resources from other neighbouring plant species. They take up those genes from other plants, thus acquiring an edge to fight environmental challenges.

By doing so, grasses shorten the process of evolutionary adaptation. If the useful genes from the neighbouring plants are acquired, then it makes them able to fight the challenges posed by hostile environmental conditions faster, which otherwise would take millions of years to acquire in the normal evolutionary path.

Lateral gene transfer allows organisms to skip the long path of evolution for acquiring traits for survival. They jump to the front of the queue by acquiring advantageous genes from some distantly related species. According to the Darwinian theory, the driving force of evolution is natural selection, which means that only those genes are selectively propagated that give the organism an advantage in adapting to the environment. For instance, in Britain there was a species of moth that lived on tree bark. It had two variants - the dominant brown coloured (that could camouflage in the brown bark) and a grey coloured minority. However, after the industrial revolution, when tree barks became greyish because of soot and ash, the brown ones became rarer, while the grey one flourished.

What happens in the case of these plants is Darwinian evolution adopted a new pathway for incorporating genes from other species in order to gain adaptive advantage.

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists take up the grass Alloteropsis semialata- which is widely found across Africa, Asia and Australia, and sequenced its genome. The information about the genes of this grass that the scientists could gather after the genome sequencing made them able to compare these genes with other economically and ecologically important grass varieties including rice, maize, millets, barley, bamboo, etc. They could identify the genes in Alloteropsis semialata that have been acquired laterally from other varieties of plants that include grasses.

“We also collected samples of Alloteropsis semialata from tropical and subtropical places in Asia, Africa and Australia so that we could track down when and where the transfers happened,”said Dr. Luke Dunning, the lead scientist of the study in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, UK.

“Counterfeiting genes is giving the grasses huge advantages and helping them to adapt to their surrounding environment and survive—and this research also shows that it is not just restricted to Alloteropsis semialata as we detected it in a wide range of other grass species,” he said to phys.org.

This research could also open up new avenues to the field of GM (Genetically Modified) Crop research. In GM crops, which are made in the laboratories, genes from other species are inserted to the crop. This selective insertion of genes from other species to a crop offers it special type of traits that would be make it economically more viable. To cope up with the global environmental changes, traits like heat tolerance, drought resistance, etc., are being tried to introduce to economically important crops through GM technology.

Researches like the one by Luke Dunning and his team shows that grasses can naturally do modifications to their genome; modifications that give them better adaptability in a hostile environment.