Year: 2022

ONE GIANT LEAP? "Phylogenomic reconstructions show that the characteristic eukaryotic complexity arose almost 'ready made', without any intermediate grades seen between the prokaryotic and eukaryotic levels of organization. Explaining this apparent leap in complexity at the origin of eukaryotes is one of the principal challenges of evolutionary biology." https://lnkd.in/d_D8bWi View in LinkedIn

POWER OF REASON. "We argue that hypothesis testing and inductive reasoning are consilient with a symbiogenic hypothesis for the origin of the Eukaryota." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

LATE INNOVATION. "We address eukaryogenesis from four perspectives — molecular phylogenetics, palaeontology, bioenergetics, and modern cell biology and biochemistry — each of which has contributed important and surprisingly congruent insights relating to this argument. It is the consilience of these lines of evidence that leads us to conclude that eukaryotes are not a primary lineage of life; rather, they are a relatively late innovation." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

TREE OF ONE PERCENT. "The phylogenetic relationships of eukaryotes have been analysed using both genome-scale data sets and smaller sets of genes...a recent analysis has shown that even these genealogy-defining genes undergo a constant rate of horizontal transfer, and the use of such a small collection of genes has been criticized for only being able to recover a “tree of one percent”." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

Extinction mugshots: 'See this? This is gone' View in LinkedIn

ENERGY DEMANDS. "A very important problem for the transition from a relatively simple single-celled or colonial prokaryote to a complex eukaryote is the requirement for energy. Only eukaryotic cells can become complex. In other words, it is not possible to become a eukaryote without a mitochondrion." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC ENERGY. "A protozoan has approximately 5,000 times more metabolic power than a single bacterium. Taking the massively expanded genomes of protozoans into consideration, prokaryotes and eukaryotes have similar amounts of metabolic energy per Mb of genome." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

SINGULAR EVENT. "So, why did prokaryotes not evolve into eukaryotes more than once? The reason is that it is impossible to generate this amount of energy in a single cell unless that cell has a powerhouse of energy production with a large membrane surface — that is, a mitochondrion." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

GENETIC MOSAIC. "Archaebacteria-affiliated genes are more highly and broadly expressed in humans, they evolve more slowly than eubacterial genes and are more central in human PINs. By contrast, eubacterial genes have duplicated much more than archaebacterial genes, and the proportion of eubacteria-affiliated genes in humans exceeds that in yeast." (PINs = protein interaction networks). https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

DISEASE GENES VS CONSTITUTIVE GENES. "In terms of human disease, eubacterial genes are significantly more likely to be involved in Mendelian diseases than archaebacterial genes. This is because archaebacterial genes are more important for human cellular functioning, and mutations are more likely to be lethal and less likely to feature in diseases of living individuals." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn