Justus Nmaduka Nwachukwu

This study shows that features of mitochondrial ribosomes, such as host protein acquisition and structural changes, are also present in an ancient insect endosymbiont, suggesting these traits arise from endosymbiont ancestry rather than mitochondrial specificity.

The paper measures transcript and protein abundance in bacterial endosymbionts to understand how they manage pseudogenes, finding that pseudogenes are transcribed but rarely produce proteins, and that tmRNA may target them for degradation.