A billion years ago, a single-celled eukaryote engulfed a cyanobacterium – an organism capable of converting the sun's energy into food in the form of carbohydrates. In one of the single most pivotal ...

During the development of marine organisms—from fertilization through to juvenile stages—it is often observed that the eggs released into the water column are initially supplied with only a small ...

Plastid transformation involves the targeting of foreign genes to the plastid's double-stranded circular DNA genome instead of chromosomal DNA. Plants engineered in this manner offer improved gene ...

Chimeric plant materials and variation in their plastomes between green and albino sectors. a, Representative chimeric leaves of the 14 plants with plastome polymorphisms identified in this study. The ...

Early in plastid evolution, many endosymbiont-derived genes were lost (1) and others migrated to the host nuclear genome (2) through a process called endosymbiont gene transfer. Plastid-harboring ...

The plastid genome (plastome) represents an indispensable molecular resource for studying plant phylogeny and evolution. Although plastome size is much smaller than that of nuclear genomes, accurately ...

But two teams have now independently found the first examples of plants whose plastids seem to lack a genome, including a giant rot-scented flower and a group of single-celled algae. Neither case is ...

The study reveals how Balanophora plants function despite abandoning photosynthesis and, in some species, sexual reproduction. Their plastid genomes shrank dramatically in a shared ancestor, yet the ...