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Mendel upended? I was interested in this story1 when the 2005 paper came out, suggesting that Arabidopsis mutants could revert to wild type, and I started doing some experiments to test Susan Lolle and Robert Pruitt's ideas. My early data seemed to support the notion that reversion was happening (although it was not consistent with RNA-mediated reversion). When Steve Jacobsen's paper came out I decid

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I was interested in this story1 when the 2005 paper came out, suggesting that Arabidopsis mutants could revert to wild type, and I started doing some experiments to test Susan Lolle and Robert Pruitt's ideas. My early data seemed to support the notion that reversion was happening (although it was not consistent with RNA-mediated reversion).

When Steve Jacobsen's paper came out I decided to grow hothead in isolation. I chose two isolated environments, and out of about 1,500 plants I didn't see any revertants. So I stopped working on this project because, like most of the community, I believed Jacobsen's results. But, I was never totally comfortable with this because of my early data. I'm glad Lolle is working on finding out how much outcrossing contributes to reversion and am anxious to see her results.

Emily Updegraff
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
epupdegr@uchicago.edu

This is a nice in-depth update on ...

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