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Scientists recreate the conditions that caused a complex life

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Scientists recreate the conditions that caused a complex life

The original version of This story It appeared in Magazine how much.

Far from being solo operators, most unicellular microbes are in complex relationships. In the ocean, the soil and its intestine, they can fight and eat with each other, exchange DNA, compete for nutrients or feed on the by -products of others. Sometimes they become even more intimate: a cell can slide inside another and get comfortable. If the conditions are correct, it could remain and be welcome, which caused a relationship that could last generations, or billions of years. This phenomenon of a cell that lives within another, called endosimbiosis, has fed the evolution of complex life.

Examples of endosimbiosis are everywhere. Mitochondria, energy factories in their cells, Once they were free life bacteria. Photosynthetic plants owe their sugars spun in the sun to chloroplast, which was also originally an independent organism. Many insects obtain essential nutrients of bacteria living within them. And last year researchers discovered the “Nitroplast” An endosimbionnt that helps some algae to process nitrogen.

Much of life is based on endosimbiotic relationships, but scientists have struggled to understand how they happen. How does an internalized cell in digestion evade? How do you learn to reproduce inside your host? What makes a random fusion of two independent organisms in a stable and lasting association?

Now, for the first time, researchers have seen the opening choreography of this microscopic dance of induce endosimbiosis in the laboratory. After injecting bacteria into a fungus, a process that required the creative problem resolution (and a bicycle pump), the researchers managed to trigger cooperation without killing the bacteria or host. Their observations offer a vision of the conditions that make it possible for the same to happen in microbial madness.

The cells even adjusted with each other faster than expected. “For me, this means that organisms want to live together, and symbiosis is the norm,” he said Vasilis KokkorisA mycologist who studies the cell biology of symbiosis at the University of VU in Amsterdam and was not involved in the new study. “So that is great news for me and for this world.”

The first attempts that fell short reveal that most cellular affairs are not successful. But understanding how, why and when organisms accept endosimbiones, researchers can better understand the key moments in evolution, and can also develop synthetic cells designed with super -powered endosimbiones.

The advance of the cell wall

Julia VorholtA Federal Swiss Institute of Technology Zurich microbiologist in Switzerland has long baffled the circumstances of endosimbiosis. The researchers in the field theorized that once a bacterium sneaks into a host cell, the relationship staggers between infection and harmony. If the bacteria reproduces too fast, run the risk of exhausting the resources of the guest and triggering an immune response, resulting in the death of the guest, the host or both. If you reproduce too slowly, it will not be established in the cell. Only in rare cases, they thought, the bacteria achieves a reproductive gold rate. Then, to become a true endosimbionnt, it must be infiltrated in the reproductive cycle of its host to make a trip to the next generation. Finally, the guest genome must eventually mutate to accommodate the bacteria, which allows the two to evolve as a unit.

“They become addicted from each other,” said Vorholt.

(Tagstotranslate) Magazine of Science

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