How I Met Your Bacterium

New research casts light on a fateful hookup, 1.9 billion years ago

By Paul Adams Posted 11.10.2008 at 4:47 pm 5 Comments

Amoeba Dr. Ralf Wagner (CC Licensed)

It seemed like an ordinary day in the primordial ooze, but romance was in the methane-ammonia air. An amoeba, pseudopoding along as usual, met and was enchanted by a particularly lovely photosynthetic bacterium. He took her inside his cell membrane, but instead of digesting her as he first planned, the two fused into a single organism. The bacterium gave the amoeba the new ability to absorb energy from sunlight, and their descendants became every plant in the world.

That's the story according to Rutgers professor Paul Falkowski, at least. The light-absorbing structures -- chloroplasts -- in plant cells are so similar from one species to another that it now seems apparent they all must have had one common ancestor. DNA and other analysis performed by Falkowski offers evidence that this family tree stemmed from the chance meeting of two unicellular organisms, close to 2 billion years ago. The amoeba (or amoeba-like organism) contributed its robust physiology to the pairing, and the cyanobacterium contributed its ability to power its metabolism with the sun's energy. Falkowski will present his findings to the American Geophysical Union next month.

[Via the Times of London]

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5 Comments

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animemaster

11/10/08 at 7:29 pm

I love that story, next tell us the one about the mitochondrial mommy.

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orajnamalik

11/10/08 at 8:04 pm

*rolls eyes*

Hmm but yeah, that's a pretty cool find!

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DarkFx

from Winnipeg, Manitoba

11/10/08 at 11:22 pm

I knew all flesh life came from plant life, and all life on the planet is from the same genetic compound. Which all started in the Ocean. Plants have been around longer, and are obviously doing pretty good considering the Grass species will likely Never die. Id would say before that, it was just the mathematical trial and error of Natural Engineering. One wave moves, hits something, bounces back, partially bounces back, or bounces back as a whole new frequency, how both these bounce back, and with polarity rebeling them, and and endless source of energy, its no doubt how life came to adapt to the Helical Frequency Originally the Amplitude from the big bang...
Please Read the Following Link:
http://mypage.uniserve.com/~ghatton/lifespec.html

~ You fall somewhere in the Balanced Frequency of Nature. Someone Along the Infinite Spectrum of Life.

FaceBook: www.darkfx.cjb.net
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www.youtube.com/d4rkfx
www.myspace.com/exodusprime

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brotherStefan

11/11/08 at 2:03 pm

"... but romance was in the methane-ammonia air."

Not sure what to believe at this point. Various experts argue convincingly that the move from "methane-ammonia air" to a life-sustaining atmosphere (mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen, last I heard) occurred spontaneously (and apparently against all odds). But the current wisdom from other self-proclaimed experts tries to convince me that humans are absolutely responsible for a long-term detrimental change in the earth's atmosphere. Hard to see how we can simultaneously accept both propositions.

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dontbother

11/11/08 at 2:10 pm

Such combinations were no doubt very common, but since then natural selection caused all but one of the families to die out. Even if some other family was able to survive in some isolated niche for a few hundred million years, the niche itself would have disappeared as continents moved around the globe.