Eating LightA small green sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, or the emerald green elysia, has incorporated
Eating LightA small green sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, or the emerald green elysia, has incorporated bits of algae into their cells to help produce food, becoming an animal plant hybrid. More precisely, the slug has managed to harness the chloroplasts in algae to create food from sunlight through photosynthesis, something scientists would have never guessed until this organism was found.Although capable of staying alive in the laboratory for months at a time with sufficient sunlight, sea slugs normally feed on algae by eating the cytoplasm of the cells and protein from various plants. Some slugs store the chloroplasts found in the cytoplasm in large digestive glands, sometimes for months at a time. What scientists didn’t know, until recently, was that the slugs actually use these chloroplasts to create food.In order to use chloroplasts, algal DNA that creates proteins that activate the chloroplasts would also need to be present. Various research teams were unable to find that DNA. But a new study from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts and published in the Biological Bulletin used fluorescent DNA markers to track the algal genes.It appears that the transferred genes are responsible for repairing damaged chloroplasts and are passed from one generation of sea slugs to the next. When the sea slug runs out of fresh algae to eat, they use the chloroplasts to create food until they can find more algae.This case has been proposed to be the first example of transfer of genes from one organism to another. However, because these organisms appear to be becoming increasingly rare over the past few years, many researchers have stopped working on them. Further reading: http://www.biolbull.org/content/227/3/300.abstractandhttp://bit.ly/1EdYw7Shttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/07/solar-powered-photosynthetic-sea-slugs-in-decline-news/Illustration credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elysia-chlorotica-body.jpg-Colter -- source link
Tumblr Blog : the-earth-story.com
#science#biology#algae#photosynthesis#animal#plant#wildlife#research#chloroplast