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Now, researchers studying a humble liverwort growing on sidewalks and garden walls say they have finally found that switch. <\/p>\n
By turning one gene off, the plant stopped cloning<\/a> entirely. By turning it back on, scientists could trigger the whole process on command.<\/p>\n Studying liverwort plants<\/p>\n A team led by Yuki Hirakawa, a professor at Hiroshima University<\/a> in Japan, zeroed in on a small green plant most people walk past without a second look.<\/p>\n The common liverwort<\/a>, Marchantia polymorpha, sprawls across damp sidewalks and shady garden corners throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Its body, called a thallus, hugs the ground and looks like flattened green ribbon.<\/p>\n Tiny disc-shaped clones grow inside small green cups along its surface. These are gemmae. A raindrop hits a cup, splashes one out, and a whole new liverwort takes root inches away.<\/p>\n Why other plants failed<\/p>\n Most plant studies use Arabidopsis thaliana plants, which are small mustard relatives that has been the field\u2019s lab favorite for decades. One thing it has never done: clone itself. That left a gap.<\/p>\n Asexual reproduction, or cloning, happens across the plant kingdom \u2013 in potatoes, strawberries, ginger, dandelions, and the sucker shoots from a maple stump.<\/p>\n A recent paper describes its reach. Yet the standard genetic toolbox could not pry the process open.<\/p>\n Hirakawa\u2019s team picked liverwort precisely because the plant clones itself in plain view, on a regular schedule. It also carries a small, well-mapped genome<\/a>, which makes targeted experiments straightforward.<\/p>\n Plants and their GEMMIFER gene<\/p>\n Earlier work from the same group had pointed at a hormone-like signal called CLE peptide, which seemed to suppress cloning in the liverwort. Useful, but indirect.<\/p>\n When the team looked at which genes changed activity in response to that signal, a short list of candidates emerged. <\/p>\n One stood out, and they named it GEMMIFER, after the gemmae it appeared to control. Plain biology, plain naming.<\/p>\n To test whether GEMMIFER does the work, Hirakawa\u2019s team used CRISPR-Cas9<\/a> genome editing to knock the gene out. <\/p>\n They followed up with a different gene-silencing approach, using RNA molecules to suppress it a second way.<\/p>\n Both routes gave the same result: the plants stopped producing gemma cups entirely. No cups, no clones, no spread. <\/p>\n Without GEMMIFER, the liverwort still grew normally as a single body, but it had lost the ability to copy itself.<\/p>\n Turning cloning back on<\/p>\n Knocking the gene out was only half the question. The team next built a modified strain of liverwort with a chemical trigger \u2013 a steroid called dexamethasone that flips GEMMIFER on whenever researchers choose.<\/p>\n A short, strong pulse of the steroid produced a striking change at the meristem, the small region of dividing cells at the plant\u2019s growing tip. Specialized appeared where ordinary tissue had been a day before.<\/p>\n A separate study mapped how those cell identities normally organize in gemma tissue.<\/p>\n Here, the new cells matured into gemmae, detached, and grew into fresh plants on their own \u2013 the entire cloning sequence run by a single gene.<\/p>\n GEMMIFER does not work alone. It works together with a second gene that earlier research had linked to gemma formation. Switch on GEMMIFER. That partner gene fires up in response, apparently launching the cloning process.<\/p>\n The chain now runs end to end \u2013 from the suppressing hormone<\/a>, through GEMMIFER, into GCAM1, and on to a new individual. <\/p>\n Hirakawa\u2019s group worked with collaborators at the University of Cambridge<\/a> and other institutions to fill in the picture.<\/p>\n \u201cThe precise way this gene reprograms cell fate is still not fully understood,\u201d Hirakawa said, noting that other plants carry similar genes whose functions remain unclear.<\/p>\n Plants, GEMMIFER, and future study<\/p>\n The GEMMIFER findings come from liverwort alone, and whether similar genes in crop plants perform the same function remains untested.<\/p>\n That question, along with the exact molecular steps connecting GEMMIFER to new clone formation, remains open.<\/p>\n Until this study, no one had identified a single plant gene that could both start and stop asexual cloning on its own. GEMMIFER does both: switch it off and cloning stops; switch it on and the whole sequence runs.<\/p>\n That has real implications for crop science. Farmers rely on cloning to grow bananas, sugarcane, and fruit trees. A switch like GEMMIFER \u2013 or its counterparts in food crops<\/a> \u2013 gives breeders a concrete genetic target to study.<\/p>\n It also closes a longstanding blind spot in plant biology. Liverwort is no longer a curiosity tucked into a corner of the field. A review of the species tracks its quiet rise as a model organism over the past decade.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that we couldn\u2019t observe this in traditional model plants didn\u2019t mean it wasn\u2019t happening elsewhere in nature,\u201d Hirakawa said. \u201cThis discovery reminds us of the vast biological secrets still waiting to be uncovered.\u201d<\/p>\n The study is published in Current Biology<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Plants have been cloning themselves for millions of years. Strawberries send out runners, potatoes sprout new shoots, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-442367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Induction](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/plants-make-clone-copies_gemmifer-gene_Hiroshima-U_2s.webp.webp\")
<\/a>Induction of gemma (clonal propagule) formation via the activation of the plant\u2019s GEMMIFER gene used for asexual reproduction, or cloning. (left) Whole plant image. (right) Magnified view of gemmae forming on the plant surface. Credit: Yuki Hirakawa \/ Hiroshima University. Click image to enlarge.Plant cloning pathway<\/p>\n