I think it is possible, but not now. The cells are fundamentally different. I'll try to find some good pictures.
Not sure the first question even makes sense to me. What do you mean by convert one into another? You could take an animal cell, suck out its nucleus, insert a nucleus and a chloroplast from a plant cell and hope it works. Or you could inject some genes to reprogram one into something like the other, like you can reprogram all sorts of cells into stem cells (you'd still have to add a chloroplast). Or something else, I don't know, and not sure what the point would be either way. What did you mean by "convert"?
IIRC there's also a big difference in the way they divide. Any cell biologists to help out?
As you see, it's not at all simple
Not that I know of. I see no reason to try, either.
No.
What makes you think that? Give evolution a billion years, and who knows what happens. Animals did pick up photosynthesis, eventually
Correct. The most recent common ancestor between plants (algae, oak trees) and animals (humans, hummingbirds) lived between one and two billion years ago, and was likely a very primitive cell.
None that I'm aware of, though there's a species of slug that can ingest chloroplasts and use them for energy, and I think there's work on genetic splicing.
It's because they're so fundamentally different, right down to the organelles in the cells. Contrast this with two species with a recent common ancestor, h. sapiens and P. troglodytes, between which blood can be transfused.
juvenissun said:
I can't speak for theoretically impossible, as scientists have more theoretics than Carter has liver pills.
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As you see, it's not at all simple
Not that I know of. I see no reason to try, either.
No.
What makes you think that? Give evolution a billion years, and who knows what happens. Animals did pick up photosynthesis, eventually
However, a technicality. Let's assume you took a modern animal cell (modern animal cells don't survive all that well without a body, but we'll ignore that for the moment), left it for a billion years, and for some reason its descendants acquired chloroplasts and cellulose cell walls all kinds of other features of "plantness".
Would they be plant cells? Or just something LIKE plant cells? In the increasingly popular evolutionary classification system we use, it would be the latter. If you look like a plant, quack like a plant, but your plantness and an oak tree's plantness don't come from the same ancestor, you are NOT a plant. You are a remarkable example of convergent evolution.
Now that I've gone off on one of my beloved cladistic tangents, can you explain why you asked the question?
(Random curiosity is a perfectly valid explanation, FWIW. I can't tell you how many questions I've asked the world for no other reason than they seemed interesting at the time. Nonetheless, I don't think I've ever seen you ask such a question without an agenda...)
I can't speak for theoretically impossible, as scientists have more theoretics than Carter has liver pills.
But theo-logically, it is not impossible.
Exodus 7:10 And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.
(I hope I didn't steal your trump card --
Apparently yes:
Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.
This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal thats just cool, said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.
Biologists know enough about plant and animal cells to know that there's no technology available today that would achieve such a feat. Indeed, biologists know that to 'convert' a plant cell to an animal cell makes little sense - to do it, you'd need to remove all the plant bits (i.e., the entire cell) and replace them with all the animal bits (i.e., an entire animal cell).
Who has said it is unbreakable?
Now why would there have to be someone who's tried it? There is no commercial interest (or close to at least) since it's an undeveloped field and we lack efficient means to do it.
juvenissun said:
It's not so much that it's unbreakable. It's more that, as Wiccan said, if you changed all the bits that make them different... you'd just replace one with the other and gain nothing interesting.
I actually think that photosynthetic cows are entirely possible - but that's not converting animal cells into plant cells any more than the green slug is a plant. "All" you need to do is engineer chloroplasts and the non-chloroplast genes necessary for photosynthesis into cow embryos. I'm sure it could be done if someone really wanted to do it.
Why?
Here we go again. Every single thread you start about evolution, we explain this to you.In most ways, it's not fundamentally different. It's just DNA. It's the same four bases, it lives in chromosomes packaged by the same proteins (some of which are almost literally the same!), it's read and replicated by the same basic apparatus. The difference is in the details. Some classes of genes are unique to each group, and others have different members with different sequences.
