Stay Right There, Mendel

Back in March I described a provocative paper that suggested that plants might be able to get around Mendel's laws of heredity. Reed Cartwright, the grad student behind De Rerum Natura, left a comment expressing some deep skepticism. Now he reports that he and Luca Comai of the University of Washington have published a letter in the journal Plant Cell. You can read the letter for free. (There's another paper commenting on it in the journal, but it requires a subscription.) In the original experiment, scientists bred plants, noting which version of a gene called hothead got passed down to new generations and which did not. Sometimes plants were born with a version of hothead that appeared to have been lost in previous generations. The scientists suggested that somehow the plants were storing a back-up copy of the hothead allele somewhere. Comai and Cartwright argue that something more conventional was ...