Essay On Gibberellins

We started off Wednesday, knowing we would be covering a topic that was completely new to pretty much everyone attending. We were covering transposable elements. These were first discovered by Barbara McClintock in corn kernels. She noticed that the corn kernels were either colored, or plain- but once in a while they were spotted. Most scientists at the time assumed that the chromosome for color had been repressed or had broken off. However, Dr. McClintock felt that if the chromosome had been repressed or had broken off, then it couldn’t make spotted kernels. Thus, she came up with the idea of transposable elements- genes or mutations that move around the genome and in doing so can cause mutations in other genes. Transposable elements are …show more content…
Our first guest speaker at Sainsbury was Alexander Jones, a UC Davis alum. He was mentored by our previous guest speaker, Dr. Ian Furner. His lab is working on hormone dynamic patters as signal indicators. In particular they are focusing on gibberellins (GA) plant hormone. They have made many sub-discoveries and observations on the way, finding that gibberellins increase in the dark, making the plant longer. (I believe plants may have adapted this as a competition mechanism, so that if they are in a bush where sunlight doesn’t get to them, then they can get taller and reach over the surrounding plants to receive sunlight). The interesting part about his research was that it was still coming along. So it was really nice of him to tell us about the research which hadn’t reached a consensus. In fact, they were due to receive some of their results and interpretations over the next few days. He also briefly went over another hormone called ABA, which reprograms the plant during drought conditions. But it had a drawback that, it’s presence made the plant more susceptible to infection. So, he mentioned that they were trying to find ways to get around