Freethought & Rationalism Archive

MrDarwin · 05-29-2003, 07:23 AM

Quote:

The two plants could hardly be more dissimilar: Arabidopsis is a small annual that lives for only weeks; the loblolly pine is a lofty tree that can live for hundreds of years. And yet, based on their analysis of more than 60,000 expressed sequence tags, Sederoff said the team found that 90 percent of the sturdy pine's genes match those of the tiny herbaceous plant.

"We wanted to know if woody and herbaceous plants evolved different genes that account for their diversity, or if they use the same genes in different ways," said Sederoff. "Our research strongly suggests the latter."

Trees And Flowers More Akin Than Dissimilar

lpetrich · 05-29-2003, 07:56 AM

Calling woody and herbaceous plants "two major kinds" is very crude taxonomy -- it's like classifying flowering plants as red-flowered and blue-flowered ones.

What is of more interest is that Arabidopsis is an angiosperm and the pine is a gymnosperm. Meaning that they had diverged in the late Paleozoic.

Also, I wonder which parts of the plants were examined; at first guess, the reproductive parts may show greater difference in expressed genes than the other parts.

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05-29-2003, 07:56 AM	#2
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	Calling woody and herbaceous plants "two major kinds" is very crude taxonomy -- it's like classifying flowering plants as red-flowered and blue-flowered ones. What is of more interest is that Arabidopsis is an angiosperm and the pine is a gymnosperm. Meaning that they had diverged in the late Paleozoic. Also, I wonder which parts of the plants were examined; at first guess, the reproductive parts may show greater difference in expressed genes than the other parts.

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