ERC Starting Grant · 2020
Kleptoplasty: The sea slug that got away with stolen chloroplasts
Rationale: Photosynthesis is almost exclusively restricted to algae and plants, with the exception of some protozoans, flatworms and marine slugs that acquire chloroplasts from algae. In metazoans, the capacity to incorporate functional chloroplasts (kleptoplasty) for long periods of time has only been described in sacoglossan sea slugs. Some species retain kleptoplasts photosynthetically active for several months that persist without access to algal gene products and despite the release of potentially dangerous metabolites, including reactive oxygen species (ROS). While kleptoplasty is intriguing from an evolutionary perspective, there are many unresolved questions on how the algal…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.