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LiveScience
LiveScience
Tiffany Taylor

These bacteria trigger a sex change in wasps — scientists finally know how

Parasitoid wasp emerging from parasitised whitefly scale.

Bacteria that live inside parasitic wasps eliminate all the male wasps in the population. Now, scientists have discovered one way they do it.

Long ago, the bacteria borrowed sex-determining genes from other insects, and now use them to crank out proteins that turn nearly all the male eggs female, a study published in March in the journal Genome Biology found.

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