Insect-bacterial mosaic produces peptidoglycan in mealybug

In October, Cell published an intriguing paper describing a functional biosynthetic pathway constituted from a combination of genes encoded by both the mealybug Planococcus citri and one of its bacterial endosymbionts, thus showing a remarkable and interesting parallelism to organelle evolution [1]. Mealybug (Planococcus citri) is a very interesting organism in which to study microbial symbiosis, in fact this insect hosts two bacterial endosymbionts, one (Moranella) living inside the other one (Tremblaya).