New research from the University of California, Davis, shows that the tiny proportion of a cell’s DNA that is located outside the cell nucleus has a disproportionately large effect on a cell’s metabolism.
The work, with the model plant Arabidopsis, may have implications for future treatments for inherited diseases in humans.
The influence of genes outside the nucleus was known to an earlier generation of field ecologists and crop breeders, said Dan Kliebenstein, professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences and Genome Center and senior author on the paper published Oct. 8 in the online journal eLife. This is the first time that the effect has been quantified with a genomic approach, he said.