jozef sedmak/Alamy
It’s freecycling, but for DNA. Grasses routinely pass genes from one plant to another, even if they belong to distantly related species.
“We’ve shown that lateral gene transfer is a widespread process in grasses,” says Luke Dunning at the University of Sheffield in the UK. The finding adds to the evidence that DNA can be transferred from one complex organism to another, and that this can benefit the organism that receives it.
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Biologists have known for decades that single-celled organisms like bacteria can pass genes around: a process called lateral gene transfer or horizontal gene transfer. But as recently as 20 years ago it was thought that this didn’t happen in organisms with more complex cells, known as eukaryotes – the group that includes all animals, plants and fungi.