It's a Slug! It's a Leaf! It's E. Clorotica!

Patrick Krug

"In the future," according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, "[gene therapy] may allow doctors to treat a disorder by inserting a gene into a patient's cells instead of using drugs or surgery." For now, however, it is still an experimental procedure ~ for us humans. In one of the only known examples of what could be called natural gene therapy, the sea slug E. chlorotica embeds chloroplasts from an alga in its digestive cells so that it can perform photosynthesis on its own. The question has always been, How does it keep those chloroplasts alive and functioning for up to nine months? And now we have the answer. "One of several algal genes needed to repair damage to chloroplasts and keep them functioning is present on the slug chromosome," explains the University of South Florida and the University of Maryland, College Park's Sidney K. Pierce, the study's co-author. "The gene is incorporated into the slug chromosome and transmitted to the next generation of slugs." So now that we have a model, the expectation is that we'll be able to figure out the mechanism (thanks to Pike): blog.mbl.edu/?p=3285