Leeds Scientists Finds Anomaly in Model Plant Arabidopsis

Researchers at the University of Leeds found out that the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana used in most plant researches is lacking an important protein present in multicellular organisms. This is the "censorship" protein labelled as SMG1 which plays an important role in the growth of animals. Scientists thought that plants did the "censorship" process—called nonsense mediated mRNA decay (NMD) differently because they did not find the protein in Arabidopsis.

The Leeds researchers debunked this notion when they discovered that every plant has SMG1 except for Arabidopsis. They are even suggesting that the last common ancestor of plants and animals had SMG1. The next step in the investigation is to find out how organisms without SMG1 such as fungi and Arabidopsis work with the absence of the protein.

Read the media release at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3448/plant_scientists_have_been_studying_wrong_plant. Read the research article at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tpj.12329/abstract.