Isolation of an archaeon at the prokaryote–eukaryote interface
By H. Imachi, M. Nobu, Nozomi Nakahara, Y. Morono, Miyuki Ogawara, Y. Takaki, Y. Takano, K. Uematsu, T. Ikuta, Motoo Ito and 12 more. 2019
588 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The origin of eukaryotes remains unclear1–4. Current data suggest that eukaryotes may have emerged from an archaeal lineage known as ‘Asgard’ archaea5,6. Despite the eukaryote-like genomic features that are found in these archaea, the evolutionary transition from archaea to eukaryotes remains unclear, owing to the lack of cultured representatives and corresponding physiological insights. Here we report the decade-long isolation of an Asgard archaeon related to Lokiarchaeota from deep marine sediment. The archaeon—‘Candidatus Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum’ strain MK-D1—is an anaerobic, extremely slow-growing, small coccus (around 550 nm in diameter) that degrades amino acids through syntrophy. Although eukaryote-like intracellular complexes have been proposed for Asgard archaea6, the isolate has no visible organelle-like structure. Instead, Ca. P. syntrophicum is morphologically complex and has unique protrusions that are long and often branching. On the basis of the available data obtained from cultivation and genomics, and reasoned interpretations of the existing literature, we propose a hypothetical model for eukaryogenesis, termed the entangle–engulf–endogenize (also known as E3) model. Isolation and characterization of an archaeon that is most closely related to eukaryotes reveals insights into how eukaryotes may have evolved from prokaryotes.
Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Chemistry, Molecular Biology
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In Ecology
- Martin Steinegger
- Milot Mirdita
- Johannes Söding
- Andrei N. Lupas
- L. Jovine
- Shitong Luo
- Heng Li
- Mohammed Alquraishi
In Environmental Chemistry
In Molecular Biology
- Johannes Söding
- Martin Steinegger
- Milot Mirdita
- Vikram Alva
- Seung-Zin Nam
- Andrei N. Lupas
- Felix Gabler
- S. Till
Citations in the corpus
- Protein Sequence Analysis Using the MPI Bioinformatics Toolkit (2020, methodology): “To demonstrate these protocols, we use as an example the experimentally uncharacterized FtsZ protein of the Asgard group archaeon Prometheoar-chaeum syntrophicum strain MK-D1, which currently represents the closest cultured prokaryotic relative of eukaryotes (Imachi et al., 2020).”