Article: Just-Isolated OVATE Gene Endows Plants With Pear-Shaped Silhouette, Thanks To Taming Wild-Type Forms.

Science Editor

A portly person described as "pear shaped" has an unmistakable contour - round at the bottom, narrowing toward the top. His or her two-phase profile may or may not be due to overeating. But what gives the edible pear (Pyrus communis) its uniquely descriptive form?

"One of the most common recurring themes is the shape of a pear," observed plant biologist Steven Tanksley at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He is senior author of a paper in today's Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences (PNAS), released online Sept. 17, 2002. Its title: "A new class of regulatory genes underlying the cause of pear-shaped fruit."

"We've discovered ...

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