Stick insects produce bacterial enzymes themselves
Many animals depend on their microbiome to digest their food. Symbiotic microorganisms produce enzymes their hosts cannot, and these work alone or together with the animals' own enzymes to break down their food. Many plant-feeding insects need microbial enzymes, such as pectinases, that degrade plant cell walls; yet some insects have overcome this dependency in a surprising way. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, found that stick insects make microbial enzymes themselves. From an ancestral gut microbe, the genes for the essential enzymes simply "jumped" as they are to their insect host. The researchers report this newly discovered "horizontal gene transfer" in a paper recently published in Scientific Reports.