A Potmato Plant?

Rice that looks and tastes like wheat? A plant that yields both tomatoes and potatoes? Strong Turkish tobacco that burns as smoothly as mild Virginia leaf? Such unlikely hybrids may now be a little closer to reality. Last week an Atomic Energy Commission researcher announced that he had achieved a long-elusive goal: the successful fusion of two different species of plant cells into a hybrid that has characteristics of both its "parents" and is capable of reproduction.

The experiment, directed by Biologist Peter Carlson at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory, involved two species of wild tobacco called Nicotiana glauca and Nicotiana langsdorffii. In the past, researchers have been able to crossbreed these two common plants by sexual means--fertilizing one plant with the pollen of the other--but many species will simply not breed sexually with others. Carlson, borrowing techniques recently developed by scientists in England and Japan, accomplished the trick with individual cells. First he treated cells from each kind of leaf with an enzyme that dissolves their protective cellulose walls but leaves the rest of the cell intact. Then he placed the two different types of cells in a solution of sodium nitrate, forced them together by spinning them in a centrifuge and, out of a total of about 10 million, achieved successful genetic "matings" of the two species in some 30 cells. Finally, after putting them in a nutritive broth in which only the hybrids could survive, he was able to pick them out one by one and grow them into full-fledged plants.

Carlson has tried the same experiment with weirder combinations--carrots and tobacco, for instance--but was unable to get the fused cells to reproduce. The problem, he says, is probably only technical, involving such variable factors as temperature and light conditions. If it can be solved, there seems to be no reason why the same cell-fusing technique cannot be used to breed totally new plants that have the most desirable features of their parents.

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