[HN Gopher] Scientists learn more about enigmatic archaea (2021)
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       Scientists learn more about enigmatic archaea (2021)
        
       Author : Hooke
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2022-01-08 22:40 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | pugworthy wrote:
       | Archaea strike me as the kind of thing we'd find on Mars. I
       | didn't realize it until doing some searching, but some archaea
       | are methanogenic (they generate methane), which has been detected
       | on Mars.
        
         | emmelaich wrote:
         | Look into Panspermia if you're not aware already. Hoyle and
         | Wickramasinghe wrote a lot on this. I don't know how seriously
         | it's regarded in the science world.
        
       | julienchastang wrote:
       | "Duggin studies cell division in the archaeon Haloferax volcanii.
       | It's a lover of salty conditions, such as those in the Dead Sea,
       | and not of volcanoes, as the species moniker suggests. (It was
       | named after microbiologist Benjamin Elazari Volcani.)" Indeed.
        
       | wombatmobile wrote:
       | Fascinating research into the question of how the first
       | eukaryotic cells arose from prokaryote antecedents.
       | 
       | The ancestors of the mitochondria organelles you see today in
       | every cell in your body were once free swimming bacteria, in a
       | world where there were no animals, and no eukaryotic cells.
       | Planet earth then, and for its first 2 billion years, was
       | populated exclusively by bacteria, or single celled organisms.
       | These cells were about one hundredth the size of the cells in
       | your body.
       | 
       | How did life on earth become more complex?
       | 
       | Billions of years before the Cambrian explosion, when the number
       | of animal species exploded into the millions, something much more
       | basic happened at the cellular level. Cells became more complex.
       | 
       | How?
       | 
       | Maybe cells engulfed other cells, and the engulfed cells
       | survived, forming a partnership or a colony.
       | 
       | Or maybe different types of cells hung out in close proximity, in
       | colonies, which eventually merged into a network of DNA
       | exchanging nodes that keep growing in complexity and
       | interdependency.
       | 
       | We don't know.
       | 
       | This new effort to grow and study archea in vitro gives us
       | something to study and experiment with.
        
         | blacksmith_tb wrote:
         | Chloroplasts are also thought to have been engulfed and
         | recruited to stay on as organelles[1], mind-boggling stuff.
         | 
         | 1:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroplast#Lineages_and_evolu...
        
         | emmelaich wrote:
         | > _mitochondria organelles ... were once free swimming
         | bacteria_
         | 
         | Maybe same goes for cilia, centrioles, golgi body, nerve cells
         | ..
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-10 23:01 UTC)