“Over tens of millions of years, there’s this constant churn of DNA sequences being added and lost,” she said. “The same process can occur for gene sequences, where entire genes duplicate or disappear. When we started looking, we noticed these changes were very widespread, but we didn’t yet know what those changes meant for the plants,” Schatz, who worked on the Telomere-to-Telomere human genome project, said.
Agriculture innovation
The genetic duplicates, or paralogs, played a crucial role in shaping traits such as flowering time, fruit size, and shape. When both copies of the CLV3 gene paralogs were turned off in the forest nightshade native to Australia, the resulting plants developed “weird, bubbly, disorganized” shapes—rendering them unsuitable for commercial sale. However, precise editing of just one CLV3 copy produced larger, more viable fruits.