The Mystery About The Rafflesia is Solved!

The rafflesia, a group of plants whose flowers are three feet wide and weigh 15 pounds each, has finally been indentified to a family. This has been a mystery to scientists for nearly 200 years. Now it has been placed in a family which also includes natural rubber trees, poinsettias, Irish bells, and cassava plants. A researcher says the rafflesia must have had a rapid growth spurt early in their evolution. This flower has surprised botanists because it's a parasite without leaves, stems, or roots, all characteristics used to group and identify plants. Scintist can usually use DNA from chlorplasts, but since the rafflesia depends only on its host for food, it doesn't have chlorplasts. So now scientists used the DNA from mitochondria because each of the plant cells have several thousands of mitlchondria, each having a complete set of genes. Scientists think that the purpose for the flowers' bigness is to attract pollinators. This finding could someday prove to be way more in important. Because if scientists were to find the gene for bigness, they could then isolate those genes and produce other huge plants.
This article was actually really easy to understand because we've already learned about parasites, hosts, chloroplasts, and mitochondria. My opinion about this article is that it really is great that we're solving more and more of nature's mysteries. I think this could be really important information, since one day it might be possible to use it to create other large plants. These large plants could possibly solve many problems. For example, if one vegetable plant were much bigger it could feed many more people, amd maybe even solve world hunger.

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