Scientist’s Discovery On Plant Breeding

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31407, 28 June 1967, Page 9

Scientist’s Discovery On Plant Breeding

A discovery which may open up new possibilities in the crossing of plants has been made by a scientist of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research at Palmerston North. Studies of the basic breeding mechanisms of plants made by Dr. K. K. Pandey, of the Grasslands Division, with co-operation from the Plant Chemistry Division, have revealed the chemical means by which the so-called S-gene controls plants’ breeding behaviour.

His finding has aroused widespread scientific interest and he has received hundreds of requests from throughout the world for reprints of the paper in which he set it forth. One Canadian scientist has called it the most important single discovery in this field since 1925. Dr. Pandey, who comes from Uttar Pradesh, India, was on the staff of the Crop Research Division at Lincoln from 1962 to 1965.

The S-gene, really a complex of closely-linked genes, determines whether a plant will be self-sterile or selffertile, and whether it can cross with another plant. What Dr. Pandey’s work has shown is that peroxidase enzymes are invloved in this control. It is conceivable that chemical techniques might be developed to inhibit the enzymes’ action, and thus to make possible the crossing of otherwise incompatible plants or species.

Dr. Pandey’s discovery has another important aspect. By showing that there are at least eight elements that can occur in different groupings in the S-gene, it also throws

light on the means by which variability is achieved in the gene as such. In different groupings, these eight elements could give 255 distinct forms of the gene, and if other elements are also present, the number of possible forms may be many times greater.

This finding fills the last major gap in knowledge of the mechanisms nature uses] to achieve variability in life. I At all other levels where variation occurs—for example, in molecules, chromosomes, individuals and populations—the means of variation were already known. These ail fitted into the pattern of a single principle: namely, the creation of a diversity of forms by rearrangement or recombination of a relatively small number of existing elements. Until now, however, it was not known whether variability in genes was a result of the same principle in operation, or whether new forms of gene were entirely new chemical entities produced in some other way. Dr. Pandey’s discovery has completed the picture by showing that variation in genes, too, is a matter of rearrangement and recombination.