Solar-Powered Slug Steals Chloroplasts and Stores Them for Emergency Food

This solar slug flies photosynthetic machines for emergency food

By Humberto Basilio & Nature Magazine

The “solar energy” sea slugs have specialized deposits in their cells that store photosynthetic equipment looted from algae, reports a study. These deposits just provide the right chemical environment to keep the device stolen, called chloroplasts, living and working to transform the sun into nutrients.

“It was the craziest thing we saw,” said the co-author of the Nicholas Bellono study, biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The authors also found that, in Lean’s times, slugs can attack these compartments to consume chloroplasts.

The compartment “is essentially as a refrigerator in the motion of chloroplasts where, after a period of famine, the slugs can go from consumption storage to survive”, explains Bellono.

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The results were published in Cell.

Scramble

Scientists discovered decades ago that certain species of sea slugs store algae chloroplasts they eat, a diet that can transform bright green slugs. But no one understood how the slugs maintain these foreign organelles without the support of the rest of the cell of algae.

Bellono and his team added chemical labels to proteins newly manufactured by the Limaces’ own cells. They found that most proteins from chloroplasts in a slug were made by the slug – and not by original algae. This meant that the slug was helping to keep the chloroplasts.

When scientists looked at the chloroplasts under a microscope, they found that the organelles were housed in special compartments in the gate of the slugs. Each compartment was surrounded by a membrane which was tested positive for markers generally found in cellular structures called phagosomes, which merge with other structures called lysomes to digest unnecessary organelles. The researchers appointed this structure the kleptosome, after a Greek word which means flying.

Life of crime

The team also found that these organelles contained ion channels – receptors that convert chemical messages into electrical signals. Among them, that called P2X4, which opens in response to the presence of ATP, an energy transport molecule produced during photosynthesis.

When Bellono and his team blocked this chain in the slugs kleptosomes, the production of oxygen of photosynthesis has dropped, showing that the kleptosome is actively involved in the operation of chloroplasts.

After discovering the existence of the kleptosome, the researchers wondered if it helped the slugs to resist famine. They compared the solar slug ELYSIA CRISPATA with Aplysia CalifornicaA non -photosynthetic slug that lacks kleptosomes. Aplysia died after three to four weeks without food, while Elysia could survive for up to four months. However, after four weeks, the Elysia The slugs lost their green color, turned Orange – just like the leaves in autumn – and stopped photosynthesis.

Microscopy revealed that the ElysiaThe kleptosomes had started to merge with lysosomes and that the color change was caused by the degradation of the chloroplast.

The study is “remarkable”, explains the cellular biologist Elena Oancea at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The study of the molecular and cellular processes of creatures as small as sea slugs is extremely difficult, she says. “It takes a lot of courage to do this.”

The discovery of the kleptosome could help to answer broader questions about the evolution of organizations and other cellular processes that we do not yet understand, says Oancea. All life is built on cells, she adds: “This is the basic principle of nature.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first publication June 25, 2025.