bio

Plastid capture

A species ending up with another species' chloroplast genome while keeping its own nuclear identity. The mechanism is ordinary: hybridise with a relative, then backcross repeatedly to your own species, and the foreign nuclear genes are progressively diluted away while the chloroplast — inherited only through the maternal line and not recombining — stays. The practical consequence is real: trees built from chloroplast genes and trees built from nuclear genes routinely disagree, so a botanist quoting a phylogeny has to say which genome it came from.