Aphids got their color from fungus?
A neat story of Horizontal Gene Transfer from the Moran lab, showing what happened to the carotenoid biosynthesis genes after aphids acquired them from fungus.
Diversification of genes for carotenoid biosyn… [Mol Biol Evol. 2012] – PubMed – NCBI.
So why would the aphid germline have access to fungal genes? Maybe I’ll have to read more…
