Symbiotic ciliates and bacteria have a common ancestor

Ciliates, just like humans, are colonized by a vast diversity of bacteria. Some ciliates and their bacterial symbionts have become friends for life, as researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in ...

'Farming' bacteria to boost growth in the oceans

Chemosynthetic symbionts are bacteria living inside or on the surface of animals, supplying their host with food that would otherwise be unavailable. It has long been known that these bacteria fix carbon and convert it into ...

Microbe-mediated adaptation to a novel diet

Insects are the most diverse animal group on earth. Many of them feed on plants, and they are constantly challenged by the diverse direct and indirect defenses of their food plants as well as an imbalanced nutrient composition. ...

How scavenging fungi became a plant's best friend

Glomeromycota is an ancient lineage of fungi that has a symbiotic relationship with roots that goes back nearly 420 million years to the earliest plants. More than two thirds of the world's plants depend on this soil-dwelling ...

Toxin-producing bacteria integrated into a pest insect

A small cicada-like insect called the Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri) threatens the world's citrus industries, transmitting an incurable and lethal citrus disease. This notorious pest harbors two bacterial species ...

A coral symbiont genome decoded for first time

The Marine Genomics Unit of OIST has decoded the genome of the algae Symbiodinium minutum. The paper was published in the online version of Current Biology on July 11. This is a major advance in understanding the complex ...

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