DNA of seagrass can only come from agriculture – BNR

In Groningen was first mapped the DNA of seagrass. Seagrass is a strange plant. For example one of the very few species that the country has gone back to sea. And that makes it interesting for agriculture, which in the coming decades to many places in the world faced with increasingly salty water

First we just eliminate the greatest confusion out of the way:. Eelgrass is no grass. It grows in the sea – all under water. “From a quarter million species of plants with flowers, there are only sixty gone back to sea,” says Jeanine Olsen, of the University of Groningen

Seagrass is a plant with flowers -. That’s from the past, from the time that seagrass still lived on the land. This reflects how drastic it is for such a plant for the country to go to sea – because how it underwater with the birds and the bees, if there are no bees? “Nevertheless reproduction fully submerged position.”

And that means that seaweed has developed a very different form pollen – which is carried in long strings through the water. “It looks like spaghetti. Not exactly beautiful to see.”

Olsen published Thursday in the science journal Nature an article about her DNA analysis to seagrass. And that tells a lot about how the plant has adapted, because all plants are descended from the algae and come from the sea. Who subsequently became land plants, but that whole weird seagrass retreated. “Most other plants can not handle that transition.”

Because the pick plants actually breathe underwater? The plants remain -so they pull CO2 from the air and make it under the influence of sunlight on oxygen. But under water is no air to get out of CO2. “What happens,” says Olsen, “is that carbon dioxide water takes on a whole complex composition, but the plant has a biological mechanism to take it anyway.”

And where land plants eg small opening gently into the leaves have, so that they can allow air through to the inside – seagrass has all the genes that they have been before, be lost. “They are now forever in the sea.”

As Olsen said, seagrass which has jumped from the land into the sea to know, but otherwise manage virtually any plant it. Whereas it would be useful if we food crops that could move a little way, because sea levels are rising, and in many places the water changes from fresh to brackish. “The question then becomes: can we rice, and tomatoes also grow in salty water?”