Re: Are there any methods to fuse plant DNA with animal DNA?

The short answer is yes you can do it; the longer answer needs to answer the question of why do you want to do this ie., what is your ultimate goal. For example, if your ultimate goal is the "mad scientist omigod, it's alive, I've created a plant/human hybrid" then what you're proposing won't work -- and there are better ways to create a hybrid.

All life on earth share common genes, so plants have a lot of the same genes that we do. However, there are DNA sequence differences between these genes and they are also spread out over different numbers of chromosomes. You can denature a strand of DNA (boil and separate the two DNA strands) so technically you can denature plant DNA and human DNA and mix it together. Some of the human DNA strands may renature with plant DNA strands. Scientists used to do this to determine how closely related (or not) two different species are (see DNA from the Beginning, www.dnaftb.org, concept 31) and to compare the amount of coding vs. non-coding DNA.

Another reason why you may want to do this is to try and find the human equivalent of a plant gene (or vice versa). As I said plants have some of the same genes that we do and by knowing how a particular gene/protein works in one organism you can get a hint of what they may do in another organism. So you can take a short DNA sequence from one organism and use it as a probe to find the equivalent in another organism. DNA seqences that match will renature together -- a G from human DNA will form hydrogen bonds with a C from plant DNA. However, only if enough of the DNA base pairs match will the two strands stay together (see DNA from the Beginning, concept 36).

The "mad scientist" ultimate goal will never work the way you described. Aside from the ethical issues, technically, there are too many differences between plant and human DNA for the strands to be all one species or another. Much easier would be to splice in genes from one species into another or change the particular plant gene for a human gene or vice versa (see DNA from the Beginning, concept 41).