throwback thursday: those plant scientists in the early 90s who were tryin to make a purple flower more purple for retail greenhouses by throwing more “make more purple” genes into the genomes but when the plants would bloom they would bloom pure white with no pigment, turns out that they accidentally discovered the plant RNAi virus defense (that wouldn’t be properly described in any organism until like 2006, when some other scientists would win the nobel prize for it) that was thinking the “make more purple” pigment genes they were inserting was a virus and was reacting to it by just rapidly destroying all the pigment genes in the plants’ genome, turning them white instead of purple lmao
Plume de Lynx 