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Why is it that plants are so much better than animals at tolerating chromosomal shenanigans? Plants can be highly polyploid, get chromes swapped out, randomly g
by quotemstr 9y ago
Why is it that plants are so much better than animals at tolerating chromosomal shenanigans? Plants can be highly polyploid, get chromes swapped out, randomly get duplicates, etc., and not seem to suffer massive problems. In a human, you duplicate one chromosome, and you get a very buggy phenotype.
- a_bonobo 9y agoThis has, as usual, several reasons :) One reason is the absence of sex chromosomes in plants. If humans get a duplicated sex chromosomes things go completely haywire. Another reason is that due to so many WGDs, plants have ample gene copies, so the copies can freely mutate around or even break, there's always a backup. Not all of these shenanigans work out, in plants this has the wonderful name 'genomic shock'. In wheat there's a candidate gene (Ph-1) which seems to somehow stabilise these instabilities between chromosome copies. In other species people have been trying for a few years to make polyploids but have been failing because there is no stability mechanism - for example, there are only few papers where people managed to make a Brassica hexaploid, these hexaploids are usually very unstable and have problems generating offspring (see for example http://www.cropj.com/malek_7_9_2013_1375_1382.pdf http://www.cropj.com/malek_7_9_2013_1375_1382.pdf )