SCIENTISTS have challenged the laws of heredity that for 150 years decreed that organisms inherit half their genetic characteristics from one parent and half from the other, write Jonathan Leake and Will Iredale.

They found that chromosomes can archive the genes of ancestors and revive them in later generations. This means an organism may display characteristics of earlier generations that neither of its parents possess.

The mechanism has been found in only one kind of plant but research suggests the same system could apply to mammals, including humans. The findings may force a rewriting of the laws of inheritance, with far-reaching implications for crop-breeding, genetics, medicine and cancer research.

“This demonstrates a parallel path of inheritance that we’ve overlooked for 100 years,” said Robert E Pruitt, professor of botany and plant pathology at Purdue University in Indiana, whose report on the studies appears in Nature, a scientific journal.

The laws of genetic inheritance date to the 19th century, when Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, cross-bred garden peas to discover how traits were passed between generations.

However, scientists have long known that genes did not always obey Mendel’s rules.Pruitt said: “They are still fundamentally correct, but not absolute.”

His team made their discovery by accident when studying deformed blooms in a small relative of mustard cress called arabidopsis.

They expected all plants to inherit the deformity — but found that 10% had normal flowers. Experiments showed these plants had reverted to the uncorrupted genes carried by their forebears.

The scientists believe the grandparental information may be held in RNA, a chemical similar to DNA, but usually thought of as a less reliable carrier of information.

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