Human speech and bird song may have more in common than we know, and the research could lead to new progress for people with genetic speech disorders.
Researchers have found that inserting an animal gene into tomatoes can produce hardier tomatoes.
Researchers at the Samuel Roberts Nobel Foundation were able to produce hardier tomatoes by inserting an animal gene into an ornamental variety of tomatoes not usually eaten called micro-toms.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marilyn Roossinck, Pin Xu and Stephanie Rogers reported that the gene controls a growth mechanism called apoptosis or "programmed cell death."
She notes that in humans, for example, "if you look at your hand and you see that you have all these fingers on your hand, separated---the reason you have separate fingers is because of programmed cell death during development.
During development human hands start as paddles, the fingers then form, and the skin between the fingers then dies.
The modified tomatoes resist a disease called the Cucumber Mosaic Virus, which, along with a parasitic piece of RNA called satellite RNA, takes advantage of the programmed cell death process to kill the tomato plant.
By inserting an animal gene they were able to stop the RNA from triggering the apoptosis process.
Roossinck adds the use of the animal gene is important, noting, "we don't know what the proteins in plants normally are that are involved in this process.
We know that it's similar to the process in animals because it looks the same.