Wonderful news, Mike!! Congratulations 🎉

😅

I am honored :) Can’t wait for both of your reviews to be out! Sounds like an amazing issue

Can’t wait to read it!

Thanks, Tera! And hopefully see you soon

Thanks so much, Mike! Here’s to catching up soon

Looking back, this study has been a long time in the making. Some of our earliest samples were collected back in 2015 during a mid-conference walk #GRCsymbioses. 9/n

Incredibly proud of this hugely collaborative effort, led by Marleny, together with members of the Mutualisms Lab @MPI_Bio, Shana Goffredi, Takema Fukatsu, and Don Windsor! 8/n

This variance in metabolic potential relative to a symbiotic condition allowed us to then test the impact of symbiosis on the diversification and ecological breadth of leaf beetles. Symbiotic beetles turned out to be more speciose and exploit a greater variety of plants. 7/n

But what about these early-diverging, non-symbiotic leaf beetles? How do they get by? It turns out they encode their digestive enzymes endogenously. Just a fewer set of them compared to their symbiotic relatives. 6/n