Uncovering a ‘parallel universe’ in tomato genetics
Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer, unlike a normal intelligent designer worthy of the name, seems to have a moto:
However, even for someone familiar with all the different ways creationism's putative designer has designed for doing the same thing - flight, swimming, body-plan, respiratory systems and eyes, to name but a few - and the regularity with which its 'designs' turn out to be the opposite of what an intelligent designer would design, it will come as no surprise that it has managed to surpass itself with the design of two different metabolic pathways for doing the same thing in the same plant!
Scientists at Michigan State University, Robert Last, have discovered that tomato plant roots produce defensive sugars - acylsugars - by two different metabolic pathways.
And, as an added embarrassment for the creation cult, they have shown that these two pathways came about as a result of new genetic information arising by accidental gene duplication almost 17 million years before they believe Earth existed.
Acylsugars are a class of very sticky sugars produced in specialized cells in the tip of the tricomes of plants of the tomato (Solanaceae) family, which includes aubergines, potatoes, nightshades, peppers and tobacco. Their purpose appears to be to act as a sort of natural flypaper. However, they are also found in the roots of tomato plants, but the root acylsugars are different enough from the tricome acylsugars to almost warrant a separate class of sugars.
It was while investigating the reason for this difference that the Michigan State University team discovered what they termed a 'parallel universe' of metabolic pathways and the genes that control them. They discovered that if you knock out the genes for making root acylsugars, this doesn't affect their production in the tricomes and if you knock out the genes that control the tricome production, acysugars are still produced in the roots.
The team’s findings are the subject of an open access paper published recently in Science Advances. They also explain the background to the study in a Michigan State University news release: