Geneticists at Purdue University announced that they have discovered plants that are capable of correcting defective genes inherited from both parents - As if there's a backup copy of the correct gene produced by the grandparents' generation or earlier.

Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance in the 19th century. The finding at Purdue suggests that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup of their genome that bypasses the usual process of heredity. If Geneticists are able to confirm the findings, it would become an exception to the laws of inheritance.

New biological questions are being asked since the discovery, including, whether the corrective process will interfere with evolution, which relies on mutations to change an organism.

Scientists all over the world are excited about this new genetic discovery. Dr. Elliott Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist at the California Institute of Technology said "It looks like a marvelous discovery." Harvard's biologist, Dr. David Haig, described the finding as "a really strange and unexpected result," which would be especially true if the findings holds up and applies widely in nature.

The genetic discovery has been found in a single species, the mustard like plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists. Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany describes the Purdue findings as "a spectacular discovery," and believes the same mechanism may occur in people as well.

The discovery is the result of a research project started three years ago. Dr. Pruitt and Dr. Lolle were trying to understand the genes that control the plant's outer skin, or cuticle. They were also studying plants with a mutated gene that made the plant's petals and other floral organs clump together. The plants had little chance of producing normal offspring because each of the plant's two copies of the gene were in mutated form.

Yet up to 10 percent of the plants' offspring were correcting the mutated gene and reverting to their normal state. Many rare events may allow this to occur, however, none involved altering the sequence of DNA units in the gene. Researchers analyzed the mutated gene, known as hothead, and found it had changed, with the mutated DNA units going back to its normal form.