A newly cultured microbe, dubbed Lokiarchaeum ossiferum, may resemble ancient precursors to the complex cells that make up plant and animals.
By growing an unusual tentacled microbe in the lab, microbiologists may have taken a big step toward resolving the earliest branches on the tree of life and unraveling one of its great mysteries: how the complex cells that make up the human body—and all plants, animals, and many single-celled organisms—first came to be.
At the time, however, Ettema had only roughly assembled genomes cobbled together from environmental DNA , which typically includes genetic material from many organisms in a soil or water sample—and skeptics argued he couldn’t be sure the eukaryoticlike genes really belonged to archaea. But in 2019, Nobu’s team cultured the first Asgard microbe, isolated from ocean mud off Japan, and reported that its genome also had eukaryotic genes.
Two years ago, geomicrobiologist Jennifer Glass at the Georgia Institute of Technology noticed something unusual about the ribosomes, the cellular structures that translate genetic information into proteins, in Asgards from deep sea sediments. The genes for a key part of these structures were much longer, and so the resulting ribosomes were much bigger than those in other prokaryotes and even in many eukaryotes.
“This study further strengthens that our ancestor is archaea,” agrees Nobu’s collaborator, Hiroyuki Imachi, a microbiologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
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