Genetic recombination allows plants to eat meat

How did plants evolve carnivorous? In an American horror movie released in 1960, "Horror Shop", only a drop of human blood is needed

Now, a study of three closely related carnivorous plants shows that the clever recombination of genes helps them evolve the ability to capture and digest protein-rich foods

Carnivorous plants have evolved many cunning methods of trapping prey

In order to find out how the above-mentioned plants evolved into traps and become carnivorous plants, a research team led by computational and evolutionary biologist Jrg Schultz and plant biologist Rainer Hedrich of the University of Würzburg in Germany analyzed the Venus Flytrap The genomes of raccoon raccoon and Drosera spathulata were sequenced

The research team recently reported in "Contemporary Biology" that they found that in the plant kingdom, the key point in the evolution of carnivorous plants is that they lived in a common ancestor about 60 million years ago, and today’s plants have replicated this ancestor.

Hedrich and colleagues concluded that carnivorous plants evolved once in the ancestors of the above three species, and independently evolved once in Nepenthes

However, Victor Albert, a plant evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, believes that the Hedrich team does not have enough data to support the two new origins, especially because some genes necessary for predation are also present in Nepenthes and three Among the common early ancestors of newly sequenced plants

However, Luis Herrera Estrellau, a plant genomics scientist at Texas Tech University, is happy to discover a new gene related to carnivorous plants

Hedrich said that in fact, it seems that most plants already have many genes necessary for "carnivorous"

Related paper information: https://doi.