Kleptoplasty

Kleptochloroplasten or Kleptoplastiden are chloroplasts, which are taken up by organisms and can be used either photosynthetically or digested later when malnutrition. You will not be passed on to offspring in contrast to the plastids of green algae and higher plants, have acquired their plastids through endosymbiosis.

The type of use and the stability of the captured chloroplasts varies greatly between groups of organisms. The highest observed stability show the Kleptochloroplasten the strong green colored sea slug Elysia chlorotica. The animal is the alga Vaucheria litorea on, digested the majority of the cell body and integrates the plastids by phagocytosis in the epithelial cells of their digestive tract. The organelle even further expressed plastid genes. In the aquarium, survived the snail without food, only by the supply of light eight to nine months, which is also the typical lifespan in the wild. Other snails of the families Conchoidea, Stiligeroidea and Elysioidea can record on this type chloroplasts, but the stability of the Kleptoplasten of E. chlorotica is unprecedented.

The pharyngeal pouch snails of the Pacific can also contact the chloroplasts of algae and store them in their midgut gland or her skin. Some other sea snails eat corals, which in turn bear drifting algae photosynthesis.

Other examples of Kleptoplastidie can be found in the unicellular dinoflagellates. The heterotrophic species of the genus Dinophysis, for example, use the chloroplasts of their prey. The selective preservation of Kleptoplastiden is used as part of the endosymbiont theory to explain the origin of chloroplasts from originally free-living cyanobacteria, cryptophytes or Haptophyta.