IN JANUARY this year, researchers reported in Nature Plants that they had managed to remove an object called the Golgi body in the cells of a plant.

This archaically named object is one of the strange complex things that fills the insides of plant cells. It is often described as looking like a stack of pancakes — albeit very small, transparent, and inside all the cells of any plant, or for that matter any animal too.

Advances in genetic engineering techniques mean that scientists can now investigate plant biology by immobilising, cutting out or destroying a given gene and watching what happens to plants that grow without it.