By Susan Milius
Aphids may be the only animals that can get a colorful type of nutrient without having to eat their veggies.
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The sap-sucking insects manage this unexpected feat thanks to ancestors that incorporated genes from a fungus into their own DNA more than 100 million years ago, says Nancy Moran of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Both pea aphids and peach aphids carry genes that make nutrients called carotenoids, she and Arizona colleague Tyler Jarvik report in the April 30 Science.
“To my knowledge, this is the first report of an animal that can synthesize its own carotenoids,” says evolutionary biologist Takema Fukatsu of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan.