How do aphids make plant galls?
Channel: David Stern
Date: 2020-11-24

This is a little video we made that describes the remarkable phenomenon of insect galls. It accompanies our scientific paper published in Current Biology:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00169-X

In the paper we identify an aphid gene that determines the color of the gall and show that this gene is a member of a large family of novel genes we call bicycle genes (read the paper to find out why!). We present several pieces of evidence that suggest that all the bicycle genes may contribute to gall development.