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:Correlation fallacy, much?

[Hurricane78]

I had to be reminded yesterday, that we can never ever directly observe causation anyway. All that we can observe, is correlation with as much other variables removed as possible. This is because physics at least demands the spacetime volumes to be different for two different (fermion-based) objects. (Pauli exclusion principle)

So observation alone still is not worth much more. Example: When I observe rain, I also observe that less people are outside. But that does not mean that people cause sunshine. :))

By the way: Have you also read the mousover text on that xkcd comic?