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Plant mutant - limnophila aromatica

oatfish

Member
Joined
8 Aug 2007
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86
Hi, i have some limnophila aromatica that has mutated and become twisting. Only one plant has done this, it looks very cool, but I wanted to know if anyone else had experienced this? The leaves now spiral up the stem rather than occuring in single whorls around the stem and the stem has a twisting corkscrew appearance. It is growing just as fine a before!
I will post a pic tomorrow but I am at work at the moment so can't take one now.
Any ideas? Thanks :)
 
Hi Heather,
Yes I've seen a couple of "variations on theme" in the odd stem or two but I have no idea why this occurs. I normally cull these if they are unattractive or just leave them to add variety if they are pretty. :D I doubt this is nutrient related but may be GH/TDS related. I see similar divergence in other stem plants indigenous to soft water biotopes like some South American Lugwigias and some Ammanias, but that could just be coincidence.

Cheers,
 
Here is an example of my form of divergence: You can see that the stems in the lower center have leaves with a much different aspect ratio (length divided by width). Whereas the upper left stem is more typical with rapier-like blades the lower form is more club-like. These are the only three stems of the bunch behaving this way. This could be entirely normal. I'll keep an eye on this to see
2241547830038170470S600x600Q85.jpg


Here is another example I had some months ago which was even more bizarre. You can see the weird rogue stems sticking up that looked similar to emmersed shape. They always grew faster than the other stems. I never got to the bottom of this one I I finally just pulled them out and used them as garnish in soup.
2581825390038170470S600x600Q85.jpg


Cheers,
 
Well, I may have a carbon footprint the size of Las Vegas but I should get credit for making it "sustainable".... :p

Cheers,
 
I imagine these kind of mutations are perfectly 'normal'. This is the way the likes of Tropica get some of their new varieties.

It got me thinking about viruses. In some terrestrial plants a virus can infect causing certain varigations and blotching of the flowers. This does not necessarily cause a problem for the plant. What's the likelihood of something like that happening to aquatic plants?
 
Yeah, these could be just normal mutation or gene expression. It's difficult to say without further study. It would be interesting to isolate these and if possible return them to their emersed state - and the flood them again to see if this form returns consistently.

You don't hear too much about aquatic plant viruses. It's not clear whether there simply aren't than many viruses, or whether their effects aren't discernible, or whether the plants have some ability to resist in a similar way in which for example hyenas and vultures are never infected by the viral diseases that kill their prey. It could even be something about water that makes life difficult for viruses. There's no shortage of animals and insects living in water that host them though, unfortunately.

Cheers,
 
Gene expression?

Is that where certain genes become more dominant and 'show themselves' at the expense of others? I know some genes are dominant and some are recessive, but I didn't realise it can happen at any happen.

I might wake up tomorrow and be blonde! But as I don't have much hair left that's fairly unlikely :lol:
 
:lol: hehe well you'd better go to sleep every night with some shoe polish nearby just in case... ;)

No it's not a matter of dominance or recession. There are a lot of inheritable structural or behavioral characteristics that are not always shown, simply because of the way or sequence in which the instructions contained in the DNA are chemically "transcribed". Each instruction causes fabrication of sequences of active proteins that then go out and do their job, whether that's to build or to repair or whatever. The transcription is not always identical so an environmental change for example can trigger chemical changes that alter the sequence, so that the proteins that are constructed are altered. I haven't a clue what causes or regulates these variations in transcription but from what I understand, regulation of gene expression is a factor in mutation.

As a simplistic example, let's say you have a genetic weakness to breathing in pollen but you've always lived in the Sahara desert. Your endocrine system wouldn't express this weakness unless you lived a place where pollen is abundant - so you move to England and get hay fever for the first time in your life.

Cheers,
 
Regulation of genes and their expression are very different to mutations. A mutation is a change in the actual DNA sequence whereas differential expression just means proteins are transcribed from different gene sequences that already existed.

This can happen for various environmental reasons or, just to complicate things even further, you can also get mutations in the genes that control expression and dominance meaning that a change that appears to be a novel mutation in a 'gene' can sometimes be a change in expression due to a different mutation!
 
Thanks for all your informative replies, I will post a pic when I can, it really is a dramatic change, I like it a lot and think I might try and get all my limnophila aromatica to be the twisted sort!
 
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