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Primordial Asgardian Cells Show Life on the Edge of Complexity


The discovery that Lokis has actin tentacles adds plausibility to a eukaryotic scenario known as Model from the inside out, Spang and Schleper say. In 2014, cell biologist Buzz Baum at University College London and his cousin, the evolutionary biologist David Baum of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, proposed an idea they had come up with at family events: that the first eukaryotes were born after a simple ancestor cell stretched out the protrus out of its cell wall. The arms first reached out to a symbiotic bacterium. Eventually, they surround that partner, turning it into a mitochondrial archetype. Both the original archaea cell and the captured symbiote were enclosed in a skeleton provided by the arms.

Back when Asgardian archaea were still known only from pieces of environmental DNA, Baum asked attendees at a conference to draw what they thought the organisms would look like. His own drawings based on ideas from the inside out, predicting that they would have protruding arms, surprised other gathered scientists. At the time, Schleper said, it seemed “weird for him to make this funny suggestion.”

A competitive atmosphere

The events of eukaryotic formation have been obscured by time interference and gene swapping so we may never know them with certainty.

For example, the two species of Loki currently in culture are modern-day creatures that differ from the archaea in the same way that a living, singing cardinal is different from the ancestral dinosaur from which it evolved. The Loki group is not even a subset of the Asgard archaea that genetic analyzes show to be most closely related to eukaryotes. (Based on the known Asgard genome, a preprint published by Ettema and his colleagues in March argued that the ancestor of eukaryotes was a Heimdall archaea.)

However, laboratories around the world are betting that bringing in more diverse representatives of the Asgardian group will yield countless new clues about their common ancestry—and ours—. Schleper is trying. So is Ettema. So does Baum, who says his lab will soon welcome a new colleague who will bring in jars of archaea from groups like Heimdall and Odin. Imachi too, who refused to talk to quantum for this story.

“If I were to be interviewed by you now, I would most likely be talking about new, unpublished data,” he explained in an email, adding that his team welcomes your efforts. Schleper group. “It’s very competitive now (although I don’t like this kind of competition),” he added.

Other sources also complain of an overly pressurized atmosphere. “It would be great if the sector were more open to sharing,” Spang said. The pressure is heaviest on young scientists, who tend to take on high-risk, high-return farming projects. Success can be more brilliant Nature paper on their resume. But wasting years on a failed attempt can reduce their chances of getting a job in science. “It’s really an unfair situation,” Schleper said.

For now, however, the race continues. When the Baum cousins ​​announced their idea of ​​eukaryotic formation in 2014, Buzz Baum said, they assumed we’d probably never know the truth. Then suddenly the Asgardians appeared, offering new glimpses of the nominal, life-promoting transitions from single-cell simplicity to overdrive.

“Before we destroy this beautiful planet, we should do a little research, because there are interesting things on planet Earth that we know nothing about. There could be living fossil things — states in between,” he said. “Maybe it’s on my shower curtain.”

original story Reprinted with permission from Quantum journal, an editorially independent publication of Simons . Foundation Its mission is to improve public understanding of science by covering research trends and developments in mathematics, the physical and life sciences.

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