Insects Stole A Plant Gene To Evade Plant Defences – IFLScience

The war between plants and animals isn’t really fair. Fauna have the advantages of movement for a start. If that wasn’t enough, whiteflies have pinched a gene from plants and used it to break down the toxins that prevent some animals from eating many leaves, according to a new paper published in Cell. Truly, this game is rigged.
Horizontal gene transfer is a common process among bacteria, where genes from one species, such as those for antibiotic resistance, are incorporated by another as if it…

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