It looks like the paper that describes the FT mRNA as a messenger molecule that is transported between plant cells is fraudulent. FT mRNA is a transcript that regulates flowering in plants.
Damn, that was a cool paper. Read about the whole thing here. Original Science article here.
Also I noticed the title of another paper which cites the Huang paper:
Dynamics of a Mobile RNA of Potato Involved in a Long-Distance Signaling Pathway.
A. K. Banerjee, M. Chatterjee, Y. Yu, S.-G. Suh, W. A. Miller, and D. J. Hannapel (2006)
PLANT CELL 18, 3443-3457
Is this real? Sadly the fraud committed in the first paper places all similar papers into doubt.
[HT: MatrinC]
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This recent retraction published in Science has cast skepticism on the purported phenomenon of mobile RNA as a functional signal that mediates plant development. I reconfirm the evidence in our work that establishes a mobile RNA of a specific transcription factor as a long-distance signal that regulates tuber formation. Our work stands independent of the FT mRNA study and is no way dependent on these results to validate the process in potato. My lab implemented a series of basic experiments that were not included in the FT mRNA study and these are documented in our recent publication (Banerjee et al., Plant Cell, Dec., 2006):
1.We confirmed the presence of the RNA in phloem cells with two different techniques, in situ hybridization and laser capture microdissection.
2.We confirmed movement of the full-length RNA of StBEL5 in grafted plants and in whole plants with two different promoters.
3.We confirmed that this movement was mediated by untranslated regions of the RNA.
4.We confirmed that photoperiod regulates movement of this RNA.
Not documented in this paper are recent results from my lab showing that both UTRs are involved in mediating movement of the RNA and that the BEL RNAs are present in phloem sap.
Wow that sounds amazing. I think that this concept is a real breakthrough. It is too bad that the FT mRNA story, the first story to advance this novel idea that mRNA can be used as an intercellular signal, was bogus. How wide spread is this phenomenon?