Camelia Bhattacharyya, Amity University Kolkata
According to Charles Darwin, “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”. This quote or saying has proven itself true over the centuries and recent findings glorify the line even more. While studying ecological relationships amongst different species, we’ve come across several words like mutualism, commensalism, predation, competition, and amensalism. Similarly, we’ve studied the food cycles and webs too. Combining ecological relationship and the food web with evolution shows amazing results as well as future perspectives and answers to several unknown questions. Similar ways have been applied to study for the first-ever gene transfer which is actually from plants to whiteflies.
Genetic thievery is something going on for ages. The inter-relation between species at times allow the steal of genes from one by another. While such thievery is most common among members of the animal kingdom, the whitefly has crossed the boundary to steal a gene from the plant kingdom. A virus might have been an intermediate in the horizontal transfer of the gene from the plants to the insect and the insect modified the gene evolutionary to remove the harmfulness of phenolic glucosides (related to the gene) for their own needs. This has been going on since time immemorial thus allowing the insects to attack and feed on the host plants and leave behind sweet secretions which again attracts moulds; thus harming the crop altogether.
This problem can be solved through a hypothesis suggesting the silencing of the gene. This hypothesis has been carried out and it was noted that an engineered double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) molecule in tomato plants could suppress the expression of the gene in the whitefly thus killing the insect and saving the crop.
Such studies should proceed even further to trace the evolutionary pathways of other such genetic thieveries and carry out genetic engineering for the welfare of other crops in a safer, cleaner, and chemical-less method.
Metadata Gene transfer is possible between plants and whiteflies by silencing the dsRNA in tomato plants that could actually kill the insect when transferred.
Also read:Jumping Genes discovered in Rabbit
Source:Ledford H. First known gene transfer from plant to insect identified. (2021) Nature. doi:First known gene transfer from plant to insect identified – Nature.
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