About four years ago, Janne Lempe, then a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, was hard at work on a series of experiments on the genetic regulation of flowering time in Arabidopsis thaliana. She crossed two strains, chosen for their difference in flowering time, and set off to the greenhouse to leave the seeds to grow.
Researchers generally raise Arabidopsis at 23° C, but with the lab's main greenhouse full, Lempe plunked her experiment into the 16° C greenhouse next door. A few weeks on, her seedlings had produced stunted, stumpy, deformed versions of the hearty white-flowered weeds she was expecting. Her plants were not only unusually small, but their leaves were also covered in necrotic brown spots, and they'd failed to flower.
Lempe's two starting strains, UK1 and UK3, were perfectly normal. So why would their offspring be sick? Right away, says Detlef ...
