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Wasps Have Injected New Genes Into Butterflies

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: September 18th, 2015, 4:00am UTC

sciencehabit writes: If you're a caterpillar, you do not want to meet a parasitic wasp. The winged insect will inject you full of eggs, which will grow inside your body, develop into larvae, and hatch from your corpse. But a new study reveals that wasps have given caterpillars something beneficial during these attacks as well: pieces of viral DNA that become part of the caterpillar genome, protecting them against an entirely different lethal virus. In essence, the wasps have turned caterpillars into genetically modified organisms.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Wasps+Have+Injected+New+Genes+Into+Butterflies%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1iBb2cW"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F09%2F18%2F0210239%2Fwasps-have-injected-new-genes-into-butterflies%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/18/0210239/wasps-have-injected-new-genes-into-butterflies?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/18/0210239/wasps-have-injected-new-genes-into-butterflies?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/-kRmRg1bbQA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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