Credit: Credit: Enrique Ibarra-Laclette, Claudia Anahí Pérez-Torres and Paulina Lozano-Sotomayor
A scanning electron micrograph shows the bladder of Utricularia gibba, the humped bladderwort plant (color added). The plant is a voracious carnivore, with its tiny, 1-millimeter-long bladders leveraging vacuum pressure to suck in tiny prey at great speed. New research shows that the U. gibba genome contains almost no noncoding DNA, demonstrating that vast quantities of this so-called "junk DNA” may not be necessary for complex life.