{"id":107197,"date":"2020-05-17T05:03:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-17T12:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/intriguing-genetics-that-flipped-the-food-chain-to-allow-carnivorous-plants-to-hunt-animals"},"modified":"2020-05-17T05:03:10","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T12:03:10","slug":"intriguing-genetics-that-flipped-the-food-chain-to-allow-carnivorous-plants-to-hunt-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/intriguing-genetics-that-flipped-the-food-chain-to-allow-carnivorous-plants-to-hunt-animals","title":{"rendered":"Intriguing Genetics That Flipped the Food Chain to Allow Carnivorous Plants to Hunt Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/intriguing-genetics-that-flipped-the-food-chain-to-allow-carnivorous-plants-to-hunt-animals2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Plants can produce energy-rich biomass with the help of light, water and carbon dioxide. This is why they are at the beginning of the food chains. But the carnivorous plants have turned the tables and hunt animals. Insects are their main food source.<\/p>\n<p>A publication in the journal <em>Current Biology<\/em> now sheds light on the secret life of the green carnivores. The plant scientist Rainer Hedrich and the evolutionary bioinformatician J\u00f6rg Schultz, both from Julius-Maximilians-Universit\u00e4t (JMU) W\u00fcrzburg in Bavaria, Germany, and their colleague Mitsujasu Hasebe from the University of Okazaki (Japan) have deciphered and analyzed the genomes of three carnivorous plant species.<\/p>\n<p>They studied the Venus flytrap Dionaea muscipula, which originates from North America, the globally occurring waterwheel plant Aldrovanda vesiculosa and the spoon-leaved sundew Drosera spatulata, which is widely distributed in Asia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plants can produce energy-rich biomass with the help of light, water and carbon dioxide. This is why they are at the beginning of the food chains. But the carnivorous plants have turned the tables and hunt animals. Insects are their main food source. A publication in the journal Current Biology now sheds light on the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1506,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-food","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}