His group and Sambanthamurthi's team applied that technique to five strains of oil palm, sampling the parent, a normal clone, and a mantled clone in each strain Although they found many differences in the epigenomes between the samples from each strain, there was just one spot in the genome where all abnormal clones had the same change: They all lost methylation in the noncoding region of a gene important for flower growth and development, Sambanthamurthi and Martienssen report online today in Nature Further study showed that when that spot lost its methylation, the coding regions of the gene were not translated correctly and the resulting protein was abnormal. "Finding that one single element within a gene that worked for all the clones was an absolute high," Sambanthamurthi says. "It was more incredible than finding a needle in a haystack. Already, the team has developed a simple test that seems to be completely capable of weeding out the bad clones very early, perhaps even at the tissue culture stage. "This discovery will greatly increase confidence in clones," Sambanthamurthi says. with great importance to And other plant researchers are very pleased: "This is a great paper agriculture," says Steven Jacobsen, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the work.