WASHINGTON: According to the recent study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution journal, the carnivorous bladderwort has some mind bending genetic material. The aquatic plant has a smaller genome than many well-known plants but more genes.
Bladderwort or “Utricularia gibba” lives in an aquatic environment and has no identifiable roots. It has floating, thread like branches alongside smaller than usual traps that use vacuum pressure to catch prey.
Scientists have analyzed the plant’s genetic makeup and discovered an interesting story. With 80 million base pairs of DNA, bladderwort is six times smaller than the grape yet has 28,500 genes to the grape’s 26,300.
“The story is that we can see that all through its history, the bladderwort has constantly picked up and shed tons of DNA”, said study pioneer Victor Albert, professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo.
“With a shrunken genome we may hope to see what I would call a negligible DNA complement: a plant that has relatively few genes just the ones required to make a simple plant. However, that is not what we see”.
The new study proposes the plant may owe its super-compact genome to a long history of rampant DNA editing.
Essentially, the carnivorous little plant is gaining and discarding DNA at a strangely quick pace. Albert and his partners think the plant’s genome has duplicated entirely at least 3-times. However, rather than simply adding all of those redundant genes to its DNA, it has continued removing the chaff.
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