quote:
Now we have another problem, however. How in the world did something that bears more than a striking resemblance to bacteria get incorporated into eukaryotic cells? And to the point where the euk cell can’t live without it? There may be multiple hypotheses, but one prominent one says that an early euk (almost all free-living single-cell eukaryotes are predators, btw) engulfed a bacterium and somehow didn’t finish it off, with the net result that when the euk divided, the bacterium was passed on to the daughter cell. This is an idea called endosymbiosis. Pretty far-fetched, right? Not necessarily. It is, after all, testable. As early as 1966, a biologist named Kwang Jeon at the University of Tennessee infected amoeba with a lethal bacteria. Although most of his amoeba died, a few managed to live — and reproduced with the bacteria inside them. Within a few years, Jeon found that the amoeba couldn’t live without the bacteria and further tests (where he removed the bacterial genome from the amoeba) showed that the newly uninfected populations quickly started dying. Re-infecting the same amoeba got it going again (cured it). Lynn Margulis, the principal proponent of serial endosymbiosis, discusses this particular experiment in great detail in an article in Natural History magazine (Bacterial Bedfellows, 1987, 96:26-33).
That's amazing! Do you have a link to any of the papers? I tried to google it, but came up blank? I've always been intereseted in this subject ever since I was 14 and played a video game who's main plot revolved around endosymbiosis.
™ Version 4.2