A research group led by Professor Masao Watanabe of the Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University, and technical staff of Yoshinobu Takada has a complex superiority and inferiority relationship regarding Mendel's "law of dominance" in which only the genetic properties of one of the parents appear in the child. I found a new mechanism to determine.The dominant gene inhibits the function of the recessive gene, and it was published in the British scientific journal "Nature Plants".

 According to Tohoku University, researchers from the Agricultural and Food Industry Technology Research Organization, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Osaka Kyoiku University, Kobe University, and the University of Tokyo have also joined the research group.

 It has long been known by Mendel's laws of dominance that only the properties of one parent's gene appear in a genetic phenomenon in which a gene is inherited from a parent to a child.A gene that appears as a property is called a dominant gene, and a gene that does not express it is called a recessive gene, but it has been thought that the property does not appear because the recessive gene has lost its function.

 When the research group investigated the rapeseed gene, they found a low-molecular-weight RNA (* 24) composed of 1 bases.When a dominant small RNA was artificially introduced into an individual with a recessive gene, it was found to have a function of inhibiting the expression of the recessive gene.

 The cause of the superiority or inferiority of genes has been debated for a long time.About 100 years ago, it was proposed that a fictitious factor that controls the superiority-inferior relationship might evolve, but after that, the theory that the recessive gene has lost its function has become predominant.

 This time, the small RNA discovered by the research group is the hypothetical gene itself proposed in the past, and the path for the gene to acquire the small RNA and become a dominant gene has been clarified.The research group says that if this knowledge is applied, it will be possible to artificially regulate the function of genes, and it is possible that useful genes will be activated to develop plant breeding technology.

* 1 Small RNA RNA existing in the nucleolus in the cell nucleus

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