Aphid's Color Comes From a Fungus Gene

Iron Nose writes with an account from Byte Size Biology of horizontal gene transfer from a fungus to an insect. The author suspects that we will see lots more of this as we sequence more genomes. "The pea aphid is known for having two different colors, green and red, but until now it was not clear how the aphids got their color. Aphids feed on sap, and sap does not contain carotenoids, a common pigment synthesized by plants, fungi, and microbes, but not by animals. Carotenoids in the diet gives many animals, from insects to flamingos, their exterior color after they ingest it, but aphids do not seem to eat carotenoid-containing food. Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik from the University of Arizona looked at the recently sequenced genome of the pea aphid. They were surprised to find genes for synthesizing carotenoids; this is the first time carotenoid synthesizing genes have been found in animals. When the researchers looked for the most similar genes to the aphid carotenoid synthesizing genes, they found that they came from fungi, which means they somehow jumped between fungi and aphids, in a process known as horizontal gene transfer."

Comments

Re:Nature's own GMO

[biryokumaru]

To play devil's advocate here, a tiger represents millions of years of predatory evolution, yet we can still hunt it to extinction. Just because nature's been doing this a lot longer then we have doesn't mean its aims are the same as ours.

When you're talking about evolution on the scale of millions of years, there's a selective pressure not to kill everything else around you. GE crops have no such incentive, and could quite possibly be extremely hard on the soil. Planting crops without regard to the needs of the soil is what led to the dust bowl.

Of course, it's more than likely anything we create will be able to perform its intended function fairly well, but be utterly unable to cope with any other situation and quickly die out. I don't imagine we'd create anything highly adaptable, that's nature's thing.