HOLD your nose. The contents of the humble stink bug’s gut might help explain how disease-causing bacteria originate.
Along with their eggs, plataspid stink bugs lay a packet of gut bacteria which the nymphs eat. As the nymphs develop, their guts divide: the top becomes a blind sac for digesting plant juice, while the bottom end swells into a fermentation chamber where the bacteria provide the stink bugs with vital nutrients.
Takema Fukatsu and colleagues at the Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, constructed a DNA family tree of the bacteria species found in different stink…
