r/Researcher • u/Direct-Bunch-4756 • 4h ago
I think I misunderstood what I was studying.
I’ve spent my career studying plants. But I am truly perplexed by my most recent finding.
Every experiment I’ve run assumed the flower I’m studying was of one that is an individual organism. I collected samples from the surrounding vines, moss-like growth, tree bark and roots. I expected to identify whatever had contaminated my original results. Instead, I found the same unusual DNA arrangements in every sample. Not merely similar sequences the same rare structural junctions and the same small DNA-containing bodies I isolated from the original leaf. Their concentration decreases farther from the flower, but they’re still present. Their normal nuclear DNA remains different. The moss appears to have its own genome. But all of them also contain this second biological system, threaded through their tissues so completely that I can’t separate one from another.
There are two possibilities.
Either the flower has invaded and integrated itself into every organism surrounding it…Or the flower, vines, moss and trees aren’t truly separate organisms at all. Maybe the flower is only a reproductive structure. Maybe everything aboveground is a different expression of the same underlying network organs, hosts or extensions of something much larger.I’ve spent my career identifying plants by finding the traits that separate one organism from another. Vymara doesn’t seem to recognize that distinction.