Plants of different species can swap chloroplasts, the little cellular factories that capture energy from sunlight, when stems graft together. The surprising discovery may explain why evolutionary histories based on chloroplasts sometimes disagree with those based on other sources of DNA.
“If you had asked me before I did this work, I would have said, ‘This isn’t happening,’” says plant geneticist Pal Maliga of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J.
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