Fireflies and Tobacco Plants Researchers create a glow seen around the scientific world
I t sounds like
a child''''s riddle'''': What do you get when you cross a firefly with a tobacco plant? Answer: tobacco that lights itself. That is essentially what a team of scientists at the University of California at San Diego has done. By outfitting a fragment of a plant virus with the gene that tells firefly cells to produce a protein central to generating light, the
researchers have created a plant that literality glows in the dark.
The technique, reported in last week''''s issue'''' of the journal Science, is significant not so much as a demonstration of virtuoso genetic engineering, but because it will provide scientists with a valuable research tool for studying how genes go about their business. By fusing the firefly gene to the genetic material of other plants and animals, biologists gain a visual cue that will help them understand in detail how genes-strands of DNA whose structure acts as a sort of coded instruction manual-tell different cells what their duties are within an organism Armed with such
specific knowledge, researchers may someday understand exactly why these instructions are occasionally garbled and, perhaps, why cancer and other gene-influenced diseases occur. Predicts Stephen Howell, a plant molecular biologist and a member of the research team: "The scientific community will be able to exploit this tool for as many purposes’ as one can imagine."
In studying genes, scientists deal basically with two components: one part supplies the code for the production of a particular protein, and the other, a sort of regulatory switch, turns the protein-producing mechanism on and off. In the human body, as in all organisms, every cell contains the complete genetic code and, in theory, has the potential to serve any function. A liver cell has the instructions necessary to grow hair, for example, and alone cell to transmit information as a. nerve does. The reason these things do not happen is that the instructions the genes-are switched on only under very specific conditions. If researchers can fuse the firefly gene to specific plant or animal genes, they will be able to monitor the "expression," or turning on, of those genes simply by looking at what parts of the organism light up, and when.
A simple cue that will/ help explain how genes work. Treated tobacco in ordinary light and glowing in the dark
(Time, November 17.19861) By Fausto Fabio de Araujo