Gene may help solve great botanical mystery - the flowering and mass die-off bamboo
Gene may explain why bamboo mysteriously flowers en masse - then dies
Good news for giant pandas: scientists from Kunming in Yunnan province believe they have identified a genetic trigger for bamboo flowering.
The barely understood cycles of mass flowering, then death, of bamboo are a problem for animals and humans as forests, sometimes covering hundreds of square kilometres, can be wiped out in one go, depriving the pandas of their food source.
Such an incident in the early 1980s wiped out 40 per cent of the panda population.
The Kunming scientists have found an important part of the puzzle - a small ribonucleic acid molecule dubbed dla-miR18 that they believe may help understand what makes bamboo flower. They have identified more than 200 "suspect genes" related to the flowering process and believe dla-miR18 could play a central role in coordinating their functions.
"The performance of dla-miR18 is very eye-catching. After flowering, its level can increase to 100 times its pre-flowering level," said professor Guo Zhenhua, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Kunming Institute of Botany and the lead scientist of the study.
The scientists' findings were published in Plant Molecular Biology Reporter late last year.