Ipomoea purpurea 'Blue Split Personality'

This flower showed a nice progression on one vine today, despite the lack of sun and warmth!

second

A little more split

Really split

And a feather

Ronnie;Pretty!Mg what a nice purple color and the star.

Ronnie,
That is really nice and dark.. I love it.
A.

Ronnie, just to see if I understand you correctly, are you saying that one flower went through all those changes today, or did the vine throw different flowers today that had these different shapes?

Either way, a very mesmerzing shapeshifter. Just for the heck of it, I think I'm going to go Google allele + shapeshifting

karen

Karen, they are five different flowers on one vine. I just put them as if it were a progression. Thought it was neat the way it showed up all at one time!!

Well, what a small world! I rambled through a couple of pages, and the first item I clicked on has an http:// address (after saving it to my Genetics folder) that says:

Translated version of http://mg.biology.kyushu-u.ac.jp/

Now, this is not the address that appears in the address bar of this website, which is: http://lifesci.rutgers.edu/~mcguire/GeneAdvising/GeneAnal1-2003/Announcements/exam1-2002.htm

It just seems so coincidental that, what with morning glories being the 2nd most researched plant (after corn) for genetics, that my first click would take me indirectly to Kyushu U through a search for allele + shapeshifting

This is a fun link and has lots of terms and ideas to guide anyone like me without much more than a high school diploma toward an understanding of the science of genetics.

Hi Ronnie, our posts crossed in cyberspace. I love the way you presented those flowers - certainly begs lots of questions.

So, evidently, in terms of the human perspective, science and mysticism are not always far apart. Another fun search through www.google.com is:

vine + knot (put Google on image search first)

I was looking for one with a morning glory, but this forum already has one from ByndeweedBeth, who once posted a picture of one of her MGs with a background of intertwined vines that seemed to suggest a celtic knot. This was shortly after we were admonished by someone visiting this forum to keep backgrounds of our pics simple so that people wouldn't "wonder what they [were] looking at". Beth, do you still have that pic? It's one of my favorites.

To stay on topic, though, would anyone like to explain or muse upon how it is possible, on a genetic basis, for a MG to throw such a diversity of shapes on one vine?

This message was edited Aug 23, 2007 3:29 PM

If I posted it, it is in the archive somewhere!

Beth, by combining a flower of a day with a tangle of vines that suggested a symbol of eternity, you created an image that gave us all something to wonder about. Hope you keep it up.

Xeramtheum did some great ones, too - I miss her.

Still hoping someone will chime in with some science.

I probably upset the person that wanted us to "keep it simple"! I try to put a plain sheet of paper behind a bloom when photographing, but it is not always possible.

I enjoy them all, just would like to keep the door open for spontaneous eureka's.

This is one of the darkest purps I've seen.. I really like it.
A.

The different degrees of splitting are the result of enzyme mediated processes and the enzymes involved can vary in degree of stability at different places in the 'organism'...similar to the way that the flaked blooms can be very different on the same vine on the same day...

I've seen solid,flaked and almost white in a row next to each other on the same length of vine...

TTY,...

Ron

Thanks, Ron - I was thinking about how the information for a genetic characteristic has its very own special location on a strand of DNA, so something else had to be doing the running around with messages to either turn the info on or off. So, can we call that "enzyme mediated processes", (in a simplified way)?

Remember the color changes that Gary (Gofast), in http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/761824/ , observed in his Ipomoea tricolor 'Heavenly Blue' flowers? He was thinking they might have been the result of hybridization between HB and I. purpurea 'Grandpa Otts', which we know is extremely unlikely since I. tricolor & I. purpurea are not known to interbreed.

I'm just going to cross-post this on Gary's thread, because I think it's a nifty explanation for him of those color changes. Spider mites stressed HB which reacted by enzymatic activity that resulted in color changes.

Any corrections, amplifications welcome.