Science And Sciencibility
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Saturday, 5 October 2024
Is this how complex life evolved?
With a tiny hollow needle and a bicycle pump, scientists have successfully kick-started an artificial endosymbiotic relationship by implanting bacteria into a fungus cell. These relationships, in which a microbial partner lives harmoniously within the cells of another organism, are thought to be what sparked the evolution of complex life. The systems could help researchers to understand how cell structures such as mitochondria and chloroplasts emerged more than a billion years ago. Researchers recreated a natural symbiosis by implanting the bacterium
Mycetohabitans rhizoxinica
into the fungi
Rhizopus microsporus
. When spores germinated, bacteria were also present in the cells of the next generation of fungi, showing that the endosymbiosis could be passed onto offspring.
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