A high-throughput genetic screening of meiotic crossover rate mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana has unraveled a century-old mystery in the life sciences.
The findings of this research were published on February 20 in Nature Plants.
In sexually reproducing organisms, individuals resemble their parents or siblings. Despite the striking similarities, it’s crucial to recognize that absolute identicalness is unattainable. This variation is attributed to the process of meiosis, which generates reproductive cells like sperm and eggs in animals or pollen and ovules in plants. Unlike somatic cell division, which duplicates and divides the genome identically, meiosis creates genetically diverse reproductive cells through a mechanism known as crossover.
Meiosis and crossover play pivotal roles in biodiversity and have significant implications in breeding where the selection and cultivation of superior traits in crops occur.
Typically, most animal and plant species exhibit a minimum of one and a maximum of three crossovers per a pair of homologous chromosomes. The ability to control the number of these crossovers could lead to cultivating crops with specific desired traits. However, achieving such control has been challenging due to the “phenomenon of crossover interference.”
2024-03-10 20:41:03
Link from phys.org