Posted on 09/01/2018 11:53:45 AM PDT by ETL
“Biochemists have been curious for decades about how plants have evolved to become one of the richest sources of chemical diversity on Earth,” said co-lead author Professor Ian Graham, from the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products, Department of Biology at the University of York.
“Using high quality genome assembly, our study has deciphered how this has happened in the opium poppy.”
“At the same time this research will provide the foundation for the development of molecular plant breeding tools that can be used to ensure there is a reliable and cheap supply of the most effective painkillers available for pain relief and palliative care for societies in not just developed but also developing world countries,” he added.
Professor Graham and co-authors produced a high quality assembly of the 2.7-billion-base genome sequence distributed across 11 chromosomes.
This enabled the researchers to identify a large cluster of 15 genes that encode enzymes involved in two distinct biosynthetic pathways involved in the production of both noscapine and the compounds leading to codeine and morphine.
“Plants have the capacity to duplicate their genomes and when this happens there is freedom for the duplicated genes to evolve to do other things,” they explained.
“This has allowed plants to develop new machinery to make a diverse array of chemical compounds that are used to defend against attack from harmful microbes and herbivores and to attract beneficial species such as bees to assist in pollination.”
The poppy genome assembly allowed the team to identify the ancestral genes that came together to produce the STORR gene fusion that is responsible for the first major step on the pathway to morphine and codeine.
This fusion event happened before a relatively recent whole genome duplication event in the opium poppy genome 7.8 million years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
Medicine from flowers controlled by warring governments for centuries — illegal until made legal and processed for regulation, and dispensed by the government — GOOD.
Medicine from weeds that grow in your yard that cant be regulated — BAD.
Thanks ETL.
The materialists will never find the answer. They will just continue down the rabbit hole.
They evolved via Lamarckism. Or, as Charles Darwin called his version, Pangenesis. /s
I wonder how many Darwin fans have any idea what Pangenesis is... my bet is not many.
“Charles Darwin’s pangenesis theory postulated that every part of the body emits tiny particles called gemmules which migrate to the gonads and are transferred to offspring. Gemmules were thought to develop into their associated body parts as offspring matures. The theory implied that changes to the body during an organism’s life would be inherited, as proposed in Lamarckism.”
Because HEAVEN KNOWS we do not have enough OPIATE ADDICTION.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equianalgesic#Opioid_equivalency_table
Epigenetics
“Can epigenetic changes be permanent? Possibly, but it’s important to remember that epigenetics isn’t evolution.
“It doesn’t change DNA. Epigenetic changes represent a biological response to an environmental stressor.”
Exactly! BUT it allows the observation that, for example, offspring of critters that survived a famine have an increased ability to pack on fat. A very handy and very adaptive change to that challenging environment.
Over a hundred years before the discovery of DNA that observation lead Darwin to the quite reasonable, and incorrect, assumption that the blood line was changing.
Forty years before the discovery of DNA, Stalin was pleased by Lamarkianism as it fit his agenda to beat natural humans into ‘the new soviet man’. That wasn’t science, that was political agenda, in the same mold as the various scientific sounding agendas today’s progressives push.
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