Giving up on photosynthesis: How a borrowed bacterial gene allows some marine diatoms to live on a seaweed diet

A group of diatom species belonging to the Nitzschia genus gave up on photosynthesis and now get their carbon straight from their environment, thanks to a bacterial gene picked up by an ancestor. Gregory Jedd of Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Singapore, and colleagues report these findings in a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.