Flowers grow stems, leaves and petals in a perfect pattern again and again. A new Cornell University study shows that even in this precise, patterned formation in plants, gene activity inside individual cells is far more chaotic than it appears from the outside.
This finding has important implications for plant engineering, where scientists design artificial gene switches to control growth or behavior. Understanding how plants manage genetic 'noise' could also inform research in other fields, from synthetic biology, where predictability is crucial, to cancer research, where random gene activity can drive tumor evolution.
"Ultimately, the research challenges the idea that biological precision requires perfect control," Adrienne Roeder, professor in the Section of Plant Biology in the School of Integrative Plant Science, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and at the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, who is corresponding author of the study. "Instead, it shows that nature doesn't eliminate randomness – it builds reliable systems and processes that work despite it."
Co-author Shuyao Kong initiated and conducted the work as a graduate student in Roeder's lab at the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. Kong is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School.
Read more at Bio Techniques