WHEN it comes to stealing genes, a tropical shrub called Amborella trichopoda is a master thief.
Mitochondria, the energy factories of a cell, contain their own, independent genomes. But when Jeffrey Palmer of Indiana University in Bloomington and his colleagues sequenced mitochondrial DNA from A. trichopoda, they found many more genes than expected.
The sequences of the “extra” genes suggest that they were acquired from the mitochondria of distantly related flowering plants, mosses and perhaps other organisms, making Amborella the greatest known gene-thief. This suggests that genetic robbery – once thought to be almost exclusively the preserve of microbes…
