Phenotypic divergence is driven by mobile genetic elements in a heritable insect symbiont

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 39, September 2026. SignificanceHeritable symbionts can rapidly reshape host ecology, yet the mechanisms generating phenotypic variation among natural populations remain poorly understood. Although some symbiont-conferred traits are encoded on plasmids and phages, whether ...

pnas.org ·2026-09-21

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