People have been accidentally genetically engineering plants--and eating GMOs--for millennia. That's the implication of a series of studies showing the ancient practice of grafting allows even distantly related plants to swap all three kinds of genomes. Now a team led by Pal Maliga of Rutgers University in New Jersey has shown that cells also swap mitochondria--energy-generating structures with a small genome. Once entire mitochondria from one plant get into the cells of another, they mix their DNA with that of the existing mitochondria. There has been growing evidence from genome sequencing that plants exchange mitochondria, but this study is the first to show it happening
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