Campus Vienna Biocenter Thriving Plant Research

At the Campus Vienna Biocenter research has begun into environmental stress-induced changes to the plant genome supported by the Austrian genome program (GEN-AU). A EUR 1.3 million budget has been allocated to the three-year project. Two task groups at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences and five at the Campus will investigate how extreme environmental conditions impact on the plant genome. It is also hoped that evidence will be found to support the hypothesis that inheritable environmental adaptations of living organisms do not occur randomly. Confirmation of this would revolutionise current thinking about heredity. The settled life style of higher organisms, and plants in particular, means that they have to resort to a wide range of reactions to adapt to environmental stress. The consortium of scientists in Vienna will now attempt to clarify whether changes in the plant genome can also arise from environmental stress. Such alterations include methylations of parts of the DNA or of associated proteins. These occasional chemical structure modifications regulate gene expression and precipitate environmental adaptations. But permanent genome changes such as base pair changes, or the multiplication of a single gene or whole chromosomes are also stress reactions. If it were demonstrated that these permanent, and hence inheritable changes are a specific reaction to environmental stress, this would mean that the plant influenced the environmental adaptations of future generations - a state of affairs at odds with current scientific teaching. "Source":[ http://www.bionity.com/news/e/52272/?pw=a&defop=and&wild=yes&sdate=01/01/1995&edate=02/14/2006 ].

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