Mitochondria Are Alive

Re:Mitochondria Are Alive by casenmgreen on Friday November 08, 2024 @02:40PM (#42089851)

I may be wrong, but I recall reading recently it had been found the same event had occurred again, fairly recently (hundreds of thousands of years, could be millions) in some species of bacteria or something like that.

Here's a thought, also; maybe once this has happened, it tends to crowd out needing to happen again.

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Re:Mitochondria Are Alive by JumpCrisscross on Friday November 08, 2024 @02:56PM (#42089972)

> it had been found the same event had occurred again, fairly recently

Would love to know the source if you have it.

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Re:Mitochondria Are Alive by joshuahedlund on Friday November 08, 2024 @03:31PM (#42090221)

Might be referring to this: https://newatlas.com/biology/life-merger-evolution-symbiosis...

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Re:Mitochondria Are Alive by casenmgreen on Friday November 08, 2024 @04:15PM (#42090529)

Huh. This is the correct news, but a different article to the one I recall. However, very interesting;

> The first occurred about 2.2 billion years ago, when an archaea swallowed a bacterium that became the mitochondria.

> The second time happened about 1.6 billion years ago, when some of these more advanced cells absorbed cyanobacteria that could harvest energy from sunlight.

> And now, scientists have discovered that it’s happening again. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, can’t normally do – "fixing" nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.

So, tremendously rare, at least to our knowledge at this time, but not a one-off.

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Re:Mitochondria Are Alive by casenmgreen on Friday November 08, 2024 @04:13PM (#42090519)

Yes. That's the one. Thank you.

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