Regenerating Plants and World Hunger

At Tokyo University, Professor Sachihiro Matsunaga and his team of researchers may have determined how to regenerate plant tissue. The idea comes from trying to revert cells from their specialized state known as unipotent cells back to what’s known as pluripotency (think stem cells). The team at Tokyo University tried to reverse these unipotent cells in the plant Arabidpsis thaliana. They modified histone proteins throughout the entire genome and came to the conclusion that once histone is demethylated, this allows for plants to be regenerative.  These histone modifications aimed to demethylate histone H3 by the enzyme LDL3.

According to a separate article on plant regeneration, it’s also possible for plants regenerative capabilities to speeded up as well by supplying hormones. Is it then possible to combine both of these techniques to be able to constantly have plants regenerate tissue? If so, this could open up a ton of possibilities to increase our food supply and hopefully come closer to ending world hunger.

Some Plants Regenerate by Duplicating Their DNA

     Why is it that some plants are able to regrow after losing plant matter?

     Some herbaceous plants, after losing plant matter, are able to duplicate their genome through DNA replication. By doing this, these plants can regenerate lost plant matter. However, these plants can sometimes overcompensate for this lost plant matter, eventually becoming more fertile and generating more plant matter than they originally would. In addition, plants that had more active genome replication would rebound more robustly after being damaged. Scientists attribute this fact to the idea that genome replication is advantageous in helping plants overcome adversity. Furthermore, the relationship between regeneration and DNA replication was explored in an experiment crossing plants that did not have the ability to duplicate their genome with those that did.

                                      

      However, it was found that the relationship between DNA replication and regeneration persevered throughout generations of plants, and that plants that did not have the ability to regenerate would be able to if their capability to replicate DNA was enhanced. It was concluded that factors that promote cell growth, such as proteins, are created more often if genome duplication is increased.

     I found this article to be extremely interesting because it shows a direct correlation between DNA replication and regeneration. The concept of regeneration itself is intriguing, and reading this article helps develop a deeper understanding of why it occurs in some species and not others.    

Source: Some Plants Regenerate by Duplicating Their DNA

     

DNA Duplication's Role in Plant Regeneration

It is not uncommon for plants to get eaten by animals that happen upon them, but how is it that these half-eaten plants can regenerate and grow back? 

For a while scientists have known that about 90% of plants duplicate their genomes without cell division, but they were unsure of the reason. The association between plant regeneration and DNA duplication was not made until just recently by researchers at the University of Illinois. The findings published in Molecular Ecology state that when plants are eaten or otherwise damaged they will overcompensate and duplicate their DNA multiple times. This DNA duplication allows for the regeneration of the lost plant matter, and also allows for the plant to become more fertile.

In a 2011 study, the replication of plant DNA was observed, showing that plants that were damaged had rampant DNA duplication that occurred. These plants also showed an increase in regeneration after being destroyed. In this new study, however, plants that could duplicate their genomes were crossed with plants that could not. The offspring showed a persistence in the association between the two traits, showing that they influenced each other. This meant that a plant had to be damaged to show the increased DNA duplication, and that a plant without this ability didn't show a high amount of regeneration. Plants that couldn't duplicate their DNA in this way showed a decrease in fertility also.

Knowing about how plants regenerate is an important thing in ecology. It also help us unravel clues about how DNA replication works and the ways that it can help a plant function properly. The ability to regenerate lost plant matter is a very huge thing for a plant to be able to do, and since it appears in 90% of them, being knowledgeable about the workings of it is important. Hopefully one day we'll know a lot more about how this process works, and it might potentially lead to other scientific breakthroughs involving regeneration.

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