Scott Poethig has noticed a subtle difference between America's oldest universities and their British counterparts -- the ivy that adorns their walls. The lobed leaves, which connote elite American education, are the juvenile form of the plant. In Britain, the same species can be found with differently shaped and colored leaves. While this distinction may seem trivial, in other plants, it can mean the difference between life and death. Poethig, a Penn biology professor, led the team that discovered "squint," the first gene involved in regulating plant maturity. "The gene encodes the protein known as Cyclophilin 40," Poethig said. "We now know from its mutant phenotype that this protein is somehow involved in regulating a specific developmental pathway involved in maturation." This discovery could lead to new strains of plants in which one form of the leaves are unpalatable to pests. For example, Poethig said that the European corn borer, a type of insect, always prefers the juvenile form of corn leaves. By manipulating this gene, the corn's natural resistance to pests could be increased by accelerating the leaves' development. "It's also been found that adult leaves are more resistant to fungal pathogens, so in principle, you could make a plant more resistant to certain fungi... because they make adult leaves instead of juvenile leaves," Poethig said. However, Poethig does not expect developments to come without drawbacks. "That's what this mutation does, is it causes an adult leaf to be expressed earlier, and that adult leaf has some characteristics that are desirable," Poethig said. "It may have characteristics that are not desirable.... We don't know what the trade-offs are." Poethig explained that much remains to be accomplished before the research can be applied to agriculture. "We've identified the corn gene, so we know the corn version of this arabidopsis gene, that we've identified," he said. "What we're now in the process of doing is trying to find mutants in that gene, to see whether or not mutations in the corn gene do the same thing to a corn plant that they do to an arabidopsis plant." Charles Gasser, a professor of cell and molecular biology at the University of California at Davis, is optimistic about the possible results with Poethig's research. "Scott's certainly a leader in his field," Gasser said. "I think his work is interesting in its own right [and] he might be able to find out things that are applicable to animal systems." For example, Gasser cited the theory advocated by some scientists that humans developed from apes by retaining certain juvenile characteristics into adulthood. The research was published in today's issue of Science, an academic journal.
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