Scientists reveal the secret behind rose thorns

Roses are as famous for their thorns as they are for their beautiful flowers. The sharp tips of the stems are a defense against grazing animals, and in the wild the rose shares its habitat with everything from eggplant and tomatoes to rice and barley.

Now, for the first time, an international research group has shown how these widely different species acquired the same type of defense mechanism. Over 400 million years of evolution, it is possible to find at least 28 occasions when plant species, independently of each other, evolved spines.

It can all be traced back to a single gene that is active in all thorny plant species, according to an article in the scientific journal sciences.

“Interestingly, the same genetic program is being reused to achieve the same thing. It’s as if the plants are using the same ‘app’ to create the tags,” says Jens Sundström, an associate professor of plant physiology at the Swedish University of Agriculture, SLU, who was not involved in the study.

There were researchers in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, which began research into plants of the potato genus (Solanum). It consists of more than a thousand species, including the common potatoes, eggplants, and tomatoes. In the wild, many plants in the family have sharp thorns that humans have cultivated over many generations.

– By selecting individual plants that lack thorns and breeding them, this characteristic has been fixed, says Jens Sundström.

The researchers tested crossing thornless eggplants with a wild relative of the crop that has thorns. The result was hybrid plants, some of which had thorns and some of which did not. By comparing the plants’ DNA, the researchers were finally able to identify a gene known as Lonely Guy (LOG) as responsible for producing the thorns.

With the help of colleagues in others The research institute, the group began mapping more plants, and found a clear pattern. So far, they have confirmed that the LOG gene is present behind the spines in about 20 different plant species, even outside the potato genus. From rice and barley to berries and roses.

The gene that controls the development of thorns is not only interesting to evolutionary researchers, it could also have very practical significance. In a paper published in the journal Science, the researchers describe how they attempted to modify the genome of thorny plants by blocking the gene that forms thorns using the Nobel Prize-winning Crispr/Cas9 gene scissors.

Like Australian desert raisins (Central loom) A sweet fruit that grows on small thorny shrubs in dry areas. The research team was able to quickly develop a thornless version, which will therefore be much easier to grow and harvest.

“This could contribute to our ability to domesticate new crops, and then there’s the potential to increase diversity in the agricultural landscape. Today, we rely on a few different crops, and anything we do to make it easier to grow more will increase sustainability,” says Jens Sundström of SLU.

Within the European Union, crops are classified as:r that have been edited using Crispr/Cas9 so far are genetically modified organisms, requiring an expensive and time-consuming licensing process to grow them within the EU. But in other parts of the world, thornless plants in commercial cultivation could become a reality thanks to new developments, believes Jens Sundström.

“I can imagine it could come very soon,” he says.

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