Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on the new research revealing how roses got their thorns

According to Greek mythology, red roses first appeared when Aphrodite pricked her foot on a thorn, spilling blood on a white rose. Since then, roses’ thorns have captured the imaginations of countless poets and filled the outdoor spaces of keen gardeners.

For those of us who love the thought of roses, but don’t like the prickles – new research published in the journal Science has found the gene that can stop them from forming!

Prickles are designed as effective deterrents to herbivores, helping to keep them protected from being eaten. However, they make the cultivation of agricultural plants difficult.

While roses are beautiful, especially in a vase – their thorns are less desirable. One common solution is to use a knife to cut off the individual thorns, however this is not only a lengthy and sometimes painful process but can also wound the plant.

To try and find the origin of the prickle, scientists started with eggplants (which also have prickles) and found a gene family called LONELY GUY or LOG for short. When they created LOG mutations, they were able to eliminate the prickles in eggplants, and wondered if this gene was responsible for prickles in other plants?

They scoured the world for plants that did and didn’t have prickles to compare them both and used genome editing to try and remove the prickles from plants as broad as the native Australian berry tree known as desert raisins - to the more well known roses.

The team managed to find LOG-related prickle genes in 20 species of plant, which not only could help to engineer thornless varieties but also provides huge insights into understanding millions of years of evolution amongst plants.

Interestingly, rose thorns are not actually thorns. 'Thorn' is used to describe a plant with branches modified for physical defence. Because the pointy projections of a rose bush are modified epidermal cells (similar to skin cells in humans), roses do not have thorns, they have prickles.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Doctor Michelle Dickinsonnano Girl, joins me here for our science
study of the week. Good morning, Good morning. This is
really interesting this study. But I tell you, the thing
that really struck me was that I learned that rose
thorns are not actually thorns.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
They're prickles. I know, but there's been so much poetry
written over so many years about rose thorns. I mean
Greek mythology, right, we sort of had Aphrodite pricking her
foot on a thorn, spilling blood on a white rose.
That's where it started. Yeah, we just call them thorns.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I know. I can just remember as a kick going mind,
the you know, being told the mine the thorn's mind,
the thorns, all that roses got thorn. So I just
always though the thoughts. You know, there is not all
the studies about there was just a little side robitt hole.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
I went down, Hey, as long as you're learning something
science on a Sunday, we're winning something. So this is
a study published in the journal Science, which is a
really big journal, and I hadn't realized that we didn't
know this before. But I love roses, but I only
have three in my garden because I hate prickles and
it's just not worth it. I'm just like, let's just
have easy care plants because I'd always getting prickled, So

(01:15):
I was like, why don't they make them without them?
And then I didn't realize that we didn't really know
how plants have prickles and how to get rid of
them until that's why it's in science, this massive journal
article today, so it's come out this week, and basically
scientists realize that nobody had really looked into this, and
so it started with a scientist going, Okay, hold on,

(01:35):
why do they have prickles? We know that plants have
pickles to prevent them from being eaten by fiber vores, right,
and it's a really really good tactic most things. I
think only giraffes can eat lots of prickly foods, so
it's to protect the plant. But we use so many
plants number one, like roses for beauty, and number two,
there are many different like BlackBerry thorns and all of
those things, like so many fruit that we now have

(01:57):
an agricultural system around where we harvest them and we
are going to take their fruit off them, so why
don't we make it easier. So they started with eggplants,
and if you've ever own an eggplant, got these tiny
prickles on it. And so they said, well, where do
these come from? And they did this whole genome sequencing
of the eggplant and they found a gene. Now, this gene,
I'm not kidding you, is called lonely Guy. And I

(02:21):
was like, right, no, I'm reading this really technical scientific article.
Going back they're having me on. And so we went
into it approutly ages ago. A bunch of scientists were like, hey,
we found this gene. It's called lonely Guy. And when
we mutate that gene, what we find is the plants
have fewer branches, smaller leaves, and they don't kind of
like they're on their own when they're planted out, like
they've got no friends, and they're so sparse. They just

(02:43):
look like a lonely guy standing in the woods. So
they named this gene, thinking that nobody's really going to
talk about this gene lonely guy. So that's what it's called.
And they found that this is the thing that actually
creates the prickles. And so if you mutate that gene,
you can actually create prickleless plants. So they did that.
So they made prickless eggplants, and they're like, cool, that's fine.

(03:03):
What else can we do? So they scoured the world
for plants that have this lonely guy gene in them,
and some of them do have prickles and some of
them don't. And they went from everything from there's this
native Australian berry tree called the desert raisin, highly prickly,
not anymore. They're able to do genome sequencing and remove

(03:23):
the prickles. And they also did it with roses. Hooray,
because I don't know if you've ever received a nice
bunch of roses before, but you may notice that they
don't have prickles on them when they come to you
in their vas because some poor florist has a knife
and some soret fingers and is cutting them all off
one by one, so you can have no prickles on
your nice bunch of and that actually wounds the plant,

(03:46):
which means that roses don't last as long. I never
knew that was a drop either, so we can't right.
It's found a lonely gene in twenty species of plant.
They were able to literally grow them without the prickles,
and so now there's a future of prickleless roses or
thornless roses. It still sounds silly, and many plants, like
the berries, things that we love to harp us. Just

(04:08):
by doing a little bit of gene editing so that
we can get stab lefts and have more joy on
our roses look more beautiful. But poor Ephrodite and all
the poets, sorry, you have to rethink your poems. Can
we read? This study is in the journal Science and
is open source, so you can have a read through.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Fantastic, Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it Be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.