Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe.
In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists uncovered the first known structure in complex cells that's capable of drawing nitrogen from the atmosphere and converting it into a form that the cell can use.
But it turns out that the microbe took on a new form long ago, becoming a full-fledged cell structure, or organelle, with a metabolism directly linked to that of the algae."It's very rare that organelles arise from these types of things," Tyler Coale, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz and lead author of one of two recent studies that identified the nitroplast, said in a statement.
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over."The first time we think it happened, it gave rise to all complex life," Coale said, referring to the evolution of mitochondria, the cells' powerhouses, approximately 1.5 billion years ago."Everything more complicated than a bacterial cell owes its existence to that event." That includes humans.
In that work, a team led by Jonathan Zehr, a distinguished professor of marine sciences at UCSC and lead author of the second recent study, recovered a short DNA sequence of the microbe from Pacific Ocean seawater. Zehr and his colleagues determined that the DNA belonged to a nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium, which they called UCYN-A.
To confirm these results, Zehr and additional researchers conducted a second study, which was published April 11 in the journal Science. Its results indicated that UCYN-A imports proteins from its host cell, suggesting that the former microbe had ditched some of its cellular machinery, relying instead on its host to function. In other words, the once-bacterium had become a cog in the machinery of its host.
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