Y'all may not give your houseplants enough credit. What looks similar an innocent philodendron gathering dust may really be a riddle wrapped in a mystery shrouded in potting soil…at least genetically.

Turns out plants have some interesting genetic quirks that go on geneticists guessing. As challenges in finding cistron-sequencing shortcuts, called barcodes, accept made clear, deciphering plant genetics tin be very tricky. Here'south a roundup of five reasons constitute DNA is totally disruptive and totally fascinating to those who study it:

1- Enter the Prison cell: One unique feature of a institute cell is the chloroplast, the engine of photosynthesis. The Dna from chloroplasts is some of the near reliable in a constitute cell. That's because it'due south inherited from but 1 parent, making it easier to understand than the DNA in the nucleus (more on that later!). However, in that location is a piffling take hold of: Occasionally chloroplasts tin be transferred from one organism to another, even from one species to another. As a outcome, a found's chloroplast may carry data totally unrelated to the species a geneticist is trying to study.

ii- Tangled Family Trees: "A lot of plants are so long lived that they can exercise things we don't typically see in animals," says plant geneticist Damon Lilliputian of the New York Botanical Garden. "For case, you lot can accept a mother tree reproducing with her peachy-grandson right beneath her." Plants overlap generations, travel minimally, and tin can clone themselves. They likewise mutate slowly. If genetic variation moves very slowly through a population, trees at one terminate of a forest tin can look different at the molecular level from trees at the other end, even though physically they are clearly the aforementioned species.

3- Two Genomes Are Better Than One: Plants accept to withstand stressful conditions without the option of relocating. Fortunately, they've developed a handy trick to expand their adaptive repertoire: Pick upward an extra genome. Through hybridization, organisms can double their genome, picking upwards additional sets of chromosomes. Animals with sexual practice chromosomes—such as humans—are diploidic; they have ii sets of chromosomes, one from each parent. Organisms with more 2 sets are polyploidic. Wheat has 6 sets, 42 chromosomes total; coffee can have eight sets of 11 chromosomes, or 88 full.* Many sets makes deciphering i or two markers in the tangled skein of chromosomes in a found cell's nucleus a Sisyphean task.

four- Sometimes, 1 Genome Is Meliorate Than Two: Given the stresses plants suffer, they have all—at some point in their history—been polyploids. But that doesn't hateful they stay that way. Over time, genes that confer no reward are dropped. The procedure is sped up by the fact that an imbalance in genetic fabric creates new problems. In plants as in animals, an extra chromosome can have serious furnishings. Klinefelter's and Downwardly's syndrome are human examples, and certain crop diseases are caused by the existence of an actress chromosome. As a consequence, plant species such as mace, which were polyploidic 10 million years ago, have cast off most of the actress genes they once had and then that today they are nearly diploidic. "This makes these plants very confusing to analyze," says Luca Comai, a plant geneticist at the Academy of California Davis. Rice, for example, is a diploid institute today, just its genetic sequence yet bears the fingerprints of polyploidy—traces of other genomes.

5- The Fungus among U.s.: "You don't often think almost this, but all of life as y'all know it is covered with fungi," Niggling says. Some plants are more prone to fungal contamination than others, and the result, according to Little, is that as many equally a quarter of the plant samples in the genetic archive GenBank are actually fungal. Another common culprit of contamination is microbial DNA that slips into a sample. Fortunately, these kinds of contaminations tin be corrected when savvy scientists spot irregularities. As more plants (and for that matter microbes and fungi) are examined, geneticists can catch and right more contamination errors.

"Plant DNA can exist more complicated because of the duplicity of its nature," Comai says. "You might look inside and find it closely resembles some other plant. Simply you might be missing a whole other genome, and then it's a totally dissimilar critter." Duplicitous daffodils—who'd have thunk it?

* Correction (5/8/12): This sentence was edited later posting to right the numbers of chromosomal sets given for wheat and coffee.