This solar solar solar is stolen photosynthetic machinery for emergency food
A specific Sea Slug species stole the chloroplasts from algae and inhabit its contraband to special organeles that can help for food in times of need
The sea slugs in the genus Elysia bright green because they keep the chloroplasts, organelles that make energy into plants.
‘The solar-powered ‘Sea Slugs have specialized depots in their cells storing Photo items stolen from algaeStudy reports. These depots only give the right chemical environment to keep the stolen bookcase, called chloroplastalive and work to hit the day of nutrients.
“It was the heaviest thing we saw,” says the co-author Nicholas Belloo, a biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The authors also know that, in soft weather, slugs can abandon these compartments to use chloroplasts.
The compartment “is like a moving refrigerator of chloroplasts where, after starvation, slugs can work out of storage to live”, Belloco said.
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The found to be published in cell.
Green grazer
Scientists discovered decades ago that some species of Sea Slug Store clloroplasts from algae were eaten, a food that could be slugs bright green. But no one understands how the slugs remain alive to foreign organelelles without the support of the remaining algal cell.
Belloo and his team added logs of chemicals to proteins that are newly created by the slugs’ own cells. They know that most proteins of chloroplasts in a slug slug are made of slug – not in original algae. That means the slug helps maintain chloropolas.
In view of the scientists of chlorists under a microsopyer, they learned that organeleles are placed in special compartments in slugs’ guts. Each compartment is surrounded by a membrane tried positively for markers typically found in cellular structures called structures called organs. Researchers call this cleptosome structure, after a Greek word that means to steal.
Life of crime
The team also knows that these organizers have ion channels – receptors converted to chemical signals of electricity signals. Among them is called P2x4, which opens up to respond to ATP, a molecule that brings energy during photosynthesis.
When Bellono and his team blocked this channel in the slugs of slugs, oxygen production from fotosynthesis dropped into the action of chloroplasts moving.
The existence of the cleptosome is discovered, researchers wonder if it helps slugs to prevent hunger. They compare solar-powered slug Elysia crispata OTHERS APLYSIA Californicaa non-photosynthetic slug lacking the kleptosomes. Disciple died after three to four weeks without food, while Elysia live up to four months. However, after four weeks, the Elysia Slugs lost their green color, became orange – like autumn leaves – and stopped photosynthesizing.
After four-week erosion of food, green Elysia Sea slugs turn orange.
Microscope revealed that the ElysiaKleptosome has already started identifying lysosoms and that color changes causing corruption in chloroplast.
The study “is unique,” says cell biologist Elena Oanana in Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The study of molecular and cellular processes of creatures as small sea slugs are harder, he said. “It takes a lot of courage to do that.”
Discovering Kleptosome can help answer the wider questions about the Evolution of Organelle and other cellular processes we have never understood, Oanayay said. All life was built in cells, he added: “This is the basic basis of nature.”
This article has been copied with permission and first published On June 25, 2025.
