鈥淲e鈥檝e always thought that the most significant aspects of an organism鈥檚 behavior are driven, at least in part, by its own genetic endowment and not the genomics of its society,鈥� said Matthew Hudson, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor of bioinformatics in the department of crop sciences who led the research with Gene Robinson, an entomology professor and the director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the U. of I. 鈥淭his is a signal that there may be more to the genetics of behavior as a whole than we鈥檝e been thinking about.鈥�

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鈥淚 thought it was super cool that we could identify genes we wouldn鈥檛 have found otherwise just by comparing genomic intervals in unrelated plant species,鈥� says co-author Professor Matt Hudson, from the department of crop sciences at the University of Illinois, US. 鈥淲e were pretty confident they were the right genes when they popped right out of this analysis, but Spalding鈥檚 group then spent seven or eight more years getting solid biological data to verify they do, indeed, play a role in gravitropism. Having done that, I think we鈥檝e validated the whole approach such that in future, you could use this method for many different phenotypes.鈥�

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