Readers respond

To the Editor:

The report of the article by Tovar et al. in Nature (November 13) suggests that the discovery of reduced “remnant” mitochondria in Giardia is novel. In fact, Cheissin (1965) has electron micrographs showing this, as do the papers from my group published in 2002.

So we have long realized that these organisms are neither simple nor primitive, but derived from aerobes at the crown of the evolutionary tree.

Where early eukaryotic phylogeny is studied, it is ill-advised to choose parasites!

Professor David Lloyd (LloydD@cardiff.ac.uk)

Cardiff School of Biosciences

Dear Editor:

Regarding “Giant leaps, not small steps” by Cathy Holding:

What a joke! A single gene causes a flower to vary from red to yellow-orange and various degrees of pink. Both red and pink varieties are described as wild species, and they can be and were crossbred. Not surprisingly, the pollinators that specialize in one or the other ...