Research report 2007 - Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Training molecularly enabled field biologists to understand organism-level gene function

Authors
Baldwin, Ian Thomas
Departments

Molekulare Ökologie (Prof. Ian T. Baldwin)
MPI für chemische Ökologie, Jena

Summary
A gene’s influence on an organism’s Darwinian fitness ultimately determines whether it will be lost, maintained or modified by natural selection, yet biologists have few gene expression systems in which to measure whole-organism gene function. In the Department of Molecular Ecology scientists are training “molecularly-enabled field biologists” to use transformed plants silenced in the expression of environmentally-regulated genes and the plant’s native habitats as “laboratories". Research done in these labs will, so they hope, increase our understanding of the influence of a gene on plants’ Darwinian fitness.

For the full text, see the German version.

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