You fertilize egg cells from a healthy plant with pollen (which contains the male germ cells) that has been treated with DNA-damaging agents

Question

You find that some of the offspring have defective chloroplasts, and that this characteristic can be passed on to future generations. This surprises you at first because you happen to know that the male germ cell in the pollen grain contributes no chloroplasts to the fertilized egg cell and thus to the offspring. What can you deduce from these results?

Answer 1

Your results show that not all of the information required for making a chloroplast is encoded in the chloroplast's own DNA; some, at least, must be encoded in the DNA carried in the nucleus. The reasoning is as follows. Genetic information is carried only in DNA, so the defect in the chloroplasts must be due to a mutation in DNA. But all of the chloroplasts in the offspring (and thus all of the chloroplast DNA) must derive from those in the female egg cell, since chloroplasts only arise from other chloroplasts. Hence, all of the chloroplasts contain undamaged DNA from the female parent's chloroplasts. In all the cells of the offspring, however, half of the nuclear DNA will have come from the male germ-cell nucleus, which combined with the female egg nucleus at fertilization. Since this DNA has been treated with DNA-damaging agents, it must be the source of the heritable chloroplast defect. Thus, some of the information required for making a chloroplast is encoded by the nuclear DNA.