Wilson County Master Gardener Association

Heidi Ledford
08 February 2013

Two publications are seeking to resurrect claims that plants can reject the inheritance of a mutated gene from their parents, in favour of a healthier ‘ancestral’ copy from their grandparents.

Susan Lolle, a plant geneticist now at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and her colleagues first published evidence in 2005 that plants had passed on genes correctly two generations down, even though the genome of the generation in between had only a mutated version¹. This type of inheritance would require some hidden reservoir of genetic information outside of DNA, some suggested — perhaps in RNA transcribed from the healthy gene, which the plant would then use to correct the mutated one. If true, those findings would upend the modern concept of genetic inheritance, and predictably they have met with considerable scepticism. [ … continue reading ]

Source:  http://www.nature.com/news/do-plants-veto-bad-genes-1.12401

Article by: Bill McAuliffe , Star Tribune

Four dogs, trained to sniff out other invasive pests, have been in the state since April, learning to detect the insect, larvae and wood.

Minnesota now has several dogs in the fight against the emerald ash borer.

In a first-in-the-nation strategy to contain the pest, state agriculture officials have hired dogs to sniff out ash borers and their larvae before they might be carried out of infested areas.

Four dogs, already trained to find endangered species of plants and animals, other invasive pests and even human remains, have been training in Minnesota since April to detect both ash wood and ash borers.

At a demonstration Tuesday in Arden Hills, two of them — Denali, a shaggy, 10-year-old German shepherd from Reno, Nev., and Wicket, an 8-year-old Lab from Three Forks, Mont. — bounded over a tangled pile of waste brush and a 5-foot-tall mulch pile before proudly discovering their prey, each in about two minutes.

“We smell parts per thousand. Dogs smell parts per trillion,” said Aimee Hurt, co-founder and director of operations for Working Dogs for Conservation, based in Three Forks, whose eight dogs have tracked Chinese bush clover in Iowa, rosy wolfsnail in Hawaii and brown tree snakes in Guam. “They’re a magic combination of really good sensing abilities with an interest in communicating with us.” [ … continue reading ]

Source:  http://www.startribune.com/local/150694655.html

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