Alright so you may be wondering exactly what gene is this girl talking about. Well, get ready for this... As this article explains, scientists have finally identified the gene the Gregor Mendel used to manipulate in his pea plants experiments! As you should recall, these are the experiments that Mendel used to establish the basic laws of genetics!
Scientists have specifically pinpointed the gene he used to control the pea plants color. This gene is common to many plant species, and the plants use it to break down a green pigment molecule. This is now the third of seven genes Mendel manipulated that researches have identified! Before, researchers were never able to identify the gene for seed color because the pea genome was so huge. Luckily, plant geneticist Ian Armstead of the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Aberystwyth, Wales, and the lead author of a report on the findings was able to stumble upon the gene.
Armstead and his colleagues were working to locate the sequence of a gene called staygreen (sgr) in the meadow grass Festuca pratensis. Some variants of this gene cause the plant to remain green even in unfavorable conditions like drought, because they cannot break down a green pigment. Festuca is genetically similar to rice, which has already had its genome sequenced. Armstead and his group compared genetic markers on the sgr region of the grass's chromosome to the respective region in the rice genome. They found 30 potential genes, including one similar to other pigment-metabolizing proteins. They then tested and confirmed that this was the equivalent to the sgr gene. To then find out if the equivalent sgr pea gene was one of the genes Mendel manipulated in his experiments, the researchers picked out the location of its sequence from pea plants that had different seed colors. Lo and behold, it was found on the same part of the chromosome as the gene that Mendel used!
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