Some individuals in a population of normally hermaphroditic bladder snails (Physa acuta) have effectively lost their male function and become females, researcher reports in a paper published on April 27 in Current Biology. This phenomenon, they say, is linked to mitochondrial DNA that’s very different from that of the fully functioning hermaphrodites of the species.
“We were studying the molecular diversity of populations of the snails for other reasons when we discovered that the mitochondrial DNA in these species was very heterogeneous so that within the species there were very, very different individuals,” coauthor Patrice David, who studies the evolution of mating systems at CNRS in France, tells The Scientist. “A fraction of individuals in the species were completely unable to be male.”
Cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) has been explored in plants since its discovery by German botanist Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter in the 1700s. It’s a maternally transmitted trait that ...
