ကိုကြီးဇော် ( မုန်တိုင်း )

                ဂ်ာမနီက ဇီဝေဗဒ ပညာရွင္မ်ားရဲ႕ ၾကိဳးစား ဖန္တီး ႏိုင္ခဲ့မွုေၾကာင့္ သာမန္ဆုိရင္ ေလးလထက္ ပိုမရွင္တဲ့ ေဆးရြက္ၾကီးဟာ ယခုဆုိရင္ ၈ ႏွစ္မက အသက္ရွင္ ေနျပီး ျဖစ္ ပါတယ္။

              ဆက္လက္လည္း ၾကီးထား၊ ရွင္သန္ေနျပီး ၂ မီတာ ဝန္းက်င္ ေလာက္ထိကို ျမင့္ပါတယ္။ အပင္ကေတာ့ သာမန္အတိုင္း ပါပဲ။ ဘာ ဇီဝ ေျပာင္းလဲမွုမွ မျဖစ္ပါဘူး။

         အပင္ရဲ႕ ေဟာင္းႏြမ္းျပီး ေၾကြက်သြားတဲ့ အရြက္ေတြ ေနရာအစား အရြက္သစ္မ်ား ျပန္လည္ ေပါက္ဖြားဖို႔ ပင္စည္ကလည္း ေကာင္းေကာင္း အလုပ္ လုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ ဆက္လက္လည္း ရွင္သန္ ေနအံုးမွာကို ေလ့လာ ေတြ႔ရွိ ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီအတြက္ ၎တို႔ ၾကိဳးစား ဖန္တီးခဲ့တဲ့ ဇီဝ နည္းပညာန႔ဲ ေဆးပညာကို အသံုးျပဳလုိ႔ စိုက္ပ်ိဳးေရး နယ္ပယ္မွာ က်ယ္က်ယ္ ျပန္႔ျပန္႔ အသံုးျပဳ ႏိုင္ရင္ သက္ရွိမ်ိဳးသုန္းမွု တစ္ခုကို ထိထိ ေရာက္ေရာက္ ကာကြယ္ႏိုင္ျပီး လူသား အတြက္လည္း အက်ိဳးျပဳပါတယ္။

          ဂ်ပန္မွာ ဆုိရင္လည္း တစ္သက္လံုး မေသႏိုင္မယ့္ အာလူးပင္ မ်ိဳးကို ၾကိဳးစား စိုက္ပ်ိဳးေနျပီး သက္ရွင္ အပင္ျပီးရင္ သက္ရွိ လူသားအထိ အဆင့္ဆင့္ ၾကိဳးပမ္း သြားမွာ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရ ပါတယ္။

Giant tobacco plants that stay young forever

              The life of tobacco plants is short. They grow for around three to four months, followed by flowering and then die. Their size is also limited, with plants only growing to about one-and-a-half to two meters tall. Now, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Münster have located the tobacco plant’s very own fountain of youth, which means they can keep it forever young. The Münster-based researchers discovered a genetic switch which can prevent the plants from change blooming to flowering. This also averts the plants’ early change demise to senescence – and suppresses the factor that halts growth. “The first of our tobacco plants is now almost eight years old but it still just keeps on growing and growing,” says Professor Dirk Prüfer, head of the Department of Functional and Applied Genomics at the IME. “Although we regularly cut it, it’s six-and-a-half meters tall. If our greenhouse were a bit higher, it would probably be even bigger. Its stem is already ten centimeters in diameter.” Whereas in normal tobacco plants the leaves, which grow from the bottom of the stem, soon turn yellow and drop off, the IME plant’s leaves stay healthy and green. This is why the scientists have christened their modified plant species “forever young”.

But what exactly do researchers do to give the plants eternal youth and make them capable of unbounded growth? “We modify the expression of a certain gene – or rather, the information contained within it – so that the plant’s flowering is delayed,” explains Prüfer. Researchers then insert the modified gene back into the plant using a bacterium. The role of the bacterium is to act as a sort of shuttle service for the modified gene.