Flesh-eating plant cleaned junk from its minimalist genome
Ed Yong for National Geographic writes on the genome of the flesh-eating bladderwart, a water plant with “a paltry 82 million letters in its genome - 40 times fewer than you, and 2,000 times fewer than the canopy plant”. Professor Leitch notes that bladderworts live in environments that are poor in the essential element phosphorus. They eat meat to harvest phosphorus from the bodies of animals.