Steve Topletz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> spaketh thusly: > I'm not sure the gene forensics is that simple. With > humans, we know what segments to check on a PCR and where > to find markers. On plants however, I think it might be a > little more complicated than a piece of cake.
I think it gets rather more sophisticated than this in that extant stands of Pk may be isolated such that their phenotype would make it problematic to determine- as a legal qualification- the lines of descent. This is to say, in a court of law, it would be difficult to assert with 100% certainty that a certain subset of plants were related in a particular way. Someone will certainly correct me if I'm wrong, but I would suppose that Pk grows in a manner similar to other phragmipediums, and reproducing asexually as well as sexually. One could postulate that plants maintained legally could, in theory, have "evil twins" that were genetically identical- clones, as a function of the way these plants grow- from propagules that were collected illegally. Now that extant populations have been decimated, it would be difficult to do a statistical survey to determine the percentage of plants that are genetically identical clones. Further complicating this is that small, isolated populations are likely to have similar genotypes. Interbreeding over generations would really muck things up. I have not read the relevant article, so I do not know how this condition was addressed. Still, without a substantially large database of samples along with a few experiments and some pretty expensive sequencing (in conjunction with some pretty fancy molecular phylogenetic footwork), proving this in a court of law is going to be tricky. It's one thing to toss a bunch of genes into a BLAST and get a number back, and quite another to sequence proposed lines of descent and say with legal certainty that plants are clearly illicit progeny. Ho ho. In a similar vein, "Dr. Braem" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> opined accordingly: > please re-read the passage of the CITES regulations Peter > (Croezen) posted on this forum. Please point out to us > where it says that seedlings in vitro produced from > "illegal" parents would not be freely tradable. Although I > admit, that English is not my native tongue, I like to > believe that my knowledge on the English language is > sufficient to be able to note that no such restriction was > sighted by me ... but maybe your eyesight is better than > mine. In the United States, the interpretation is such that plants coming from parents that were acquired in contravention of CITES are illegal. The Office of Management Authority, for example, noted that while flasks of Paph. vietnamense from .de "might" be legal, those from a particular grower inside the United States (not Antec) came from a source in which the veracity of the CITES export permits from the range country is in doubt. And from that, the flasks themselves could be violations of CITES. This interpretation is not shared by all CITES signatory nations, and take a more literal standpoint on the "Appendix I in flask is OK!" aspect. Don't shoot the messenger (because I'm bulletproof and fire-resistant), -AJHicks Chandler, AZ _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) orchids@orchidguide.com http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
