See:
https://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810138059
I had a gamma cell in my lab so I tried mutating cuttings. I ended with a lot of “monsters”.
As I recall, I first read about mutations in the Golden Book Encyclopedia when I was in 2nd grade. I was fascinated! Over the years I read what I could find, including the suggestion that the glow-in-the-dark paint on old radium-dial watches could induce mutations. It’s just as well that I never found any old watches.
But I could dream. This one kept me going for a while, and I still wonder about marigolds that had blossoms “half yellow and half blue”.
Miller: These seeds have been A-bombed (1960)
http://bulbnrose.x10.mx/Heredity/Abomb/Abomb.html
I also learned that even vegetable oils can induce mutations. They are far and away safer than Radium, X-rays, Cobalt-60, colchicine and whatnot. It took me a lot of years to remember what I had read, and to track down the research.
Singleton: Vegetable oils as mutagens (1962)
http://bulbnrose.x10.mx/Heredity/SingletonOils1962/SingletonOils1962.html
Dr. Lammerts also did a bit of experimenting with roses.
Lammerts: Induced Mutations (1961)
http://bulbnrose.x10.mx/Roses/breeding/Lammerts/LammertsMutations1961.html
It is disconcerting to read Lammerts’ off-hand rejection of evolution. He even asserted that the mere “concept of evolution has had a bad influence on research”. He implied that evolutionists were blinded by a theory, which tainted all their research.
Lammerts, of course, imagined himself to be free from bias … and helped found the creation “science” movement to prove his objectivity. /s
Furthermore:
In 1931, McClintock studied X-ray induced “mutations” in maize. She reported her tesults in her paper, Cytological observations of deficiencies involving known genes, translocations and an inversion in Zea mays. Missouri Agr. Exp. Sta. Res. Bull. 163, l-30 (1931).
https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/52974
In her 1983 Nobel Lecture, she summarized briefly, “None of the recessive phenotypes in the examined plants arose from ‘gene mutation’. Each reflected loss of a segment of a chromosome that carried the wild-type allele, and X-rays were responsible for inducing these deficiencies.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/search/?s=McClintock
In other words, Lammerts’ comments on “mutations” were 30 years out of date when he made them.
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Back in my college days ('70s), I worked part time in the school library. One day I went in to find a book cart with a freshly bound set of the Creation Research Society Quarterly. I just had to look.
Most of the stuff was thoroughly forgettable. I do remember the one where the author insisted that the beginning of Life violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (The one dealing with entropy.) And therefore the ONLY explanation for Life is supernatural interference. Commonly called magic. The poor guy didn’t see was that if his interpretation were correct, the same law would be violated by the continuation of Life.
Around the same time, and in the same library, I read What is Life? by physicist Erwin Schrödinger (the guy with the zombie cat). He wrote, “Every process, event, happening — call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy — or, as you may say, produces positive entropy — and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy — which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.”
Alas, Schrödinger put this all down to metabolism … which doesn’t answer the question of how Life got started.
Fortunately, is has become clear that Schrödinger was mistaken about entropy always increasing, everywhere. In case you missed the memo, Spanish physicist Juan Parrondo proved that negative entropy can be generated wherever conditions alternate. For instance, hot and cold, light and dark. Just the sort of conditions we find all around us.
It is well known that gambling casinos make their money by offering games that favor The House. Keep betting on a game long enough, and you will lose whatever money you have at hand. Different games drain your funds at different rates, but you still lose to The House in the long run.
To demonstrate his theory, Parrondo showed that it is possible to achieve a net win (accumulate negative loss) by alternating bets between two losing games. This can be done as A, B, A, B, A, B or AA, BB, AA, BB. More interestingly, the choice of games can be randomized by flipping a coin: heads for A, tails for B. The accumulation of negative loss is not so rapid in the randomized model, but it still works.
This gets us somewhere, because there is evidence that RNA metabolism appears to be optimized for near freezing temperatures. Meanwhile, there is an interesting inference that sometime before “Life as we know it” came into existence, there were other forms of Life as we don’t know it with different DNA codes. These, apparently, survived extreme heat.
Journal of Molecular Evolution, 61(2): 264-73. (Aug 2005)
The RNA world on ice: a new scenario for the emergence of RNA information.
Vlassov AV1, Kazakov SA, Johnston BH, Landweber LF
Abstract The RNA world hypothesis refers to a hypothetical era prior to coded peptide synthesis, where RNA was the major structural, genetic, and catalytic agent. Though it is a widely accepted scenario, a number of vexing difficulties remain. In this review we focus on a missing link of the RNA world hypothesis — primitive miniribozymes, in particular ligases, and discuss the role of these molecules in the evolution of RNA size and complexity. We argue that prebiotic conditions associated with freezing, rather than “warm and wet” conditions, could have been of key importance in the early RNA world.
Journal of Molecular Evolution, 61(1): 54-64 (Jul 2005)
Evolution of the Genetic Triplet Code via Two Types of Doublet Codons
Huan-Lin Wu, Stefan Bagby, Jean M.H. van den Elsen
Abstract Explaining the apparent non-random codon distribution and the nature and number of amino acids in the ‘standard’ genetic code remains a challenge, despite the various hypotheses so far proposed. In this paper we propose a simple new hypothesis for code evolution involving a progression from singlet to doublet to triplet codons with a reading mechanism that moves three bases each step. We suggest that triplet codons gradually evolved from two types of ambiguous doublet codons, those in which the first two bases of each three-base window were read (‘prefix’ codons) and those in which the last two bases of each window were read (‘suffix’ codons). This hypothesis explains multiple features of the genetic code such as the origin of the pattern of four-fold degenerate and two-fold degenerate triplet codons, the origin of its error minimising properties, and why there are only 20 amino acids.
Neither of the hypothetical doublet codes provided for glutamine and asparagine, the two amino acids that are least stable at high temperatures. This suggests that the “universal” DNA code is derived from two earlier systems that thrived on heat.
I am inclined to favor deep sea vents as the “negative entropy generators” that got the ball rolling for the beginnings of Life. Super heated gases spewing into the frigid water looks promising. And such a turbulent environment would certainly encourage the most primitive proto-life entities to go out on their own.
… maybe Garret Lisi et al will solve all of it one day with further work on fixing the problems of “”An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” .” I got lost when l assumed E8 explained everything.
The only known commercial success in roses (in at least North America) has been ‘Bubble Double’, which is slightly shorter/wider than Double Knock Out, and has also seemed to have removed the violet color spectrum out of it in some way, shape, or form. Its a superior plant, but the color is unfortunately less popular. In my opinion, there are perhaps more petals, but I’m not going to try to count both.
In the paper linked by OP, they said they used Pink Panther, which IIRC is a triploid HT (among the several handfuls that exist). It is possibly easier to try many of these various mutagenic methods with diploids, but I am not sure.
In most cases, other methods of creating new roses is probably a better avenue. One of the few methods worth pursuit IMO for ornamental horticulture is increasing the ploidy beyond the base in order to improve plant architecture and elevate blooms. In roses, that would be beyond tetraploid. So, for example, a mixaploid, hexaploid, or octoploid HT. Then again, I’ve never seen it exist, but it’s possible.