{"id":3615,"date":"2016-05-30T00:13:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T00:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=3615"},"modified":"2016-05-30T00:13:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T00:13:39","slug":"first-eukaryotes-found-without-a-normal-cellular-power-supply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/30\/first-eukaryotes-found-without-a-normal-cellular-power-supply\/","title":{"rendered":"First eukaryotes found without a normal cellular power supply"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/news\/2016\/05\/first-eukaryotes-found-without-normal-cellular-power-supply?utm_source=sciencemagazine&amp;utm_medium=facebook-text&amp;utm_campaign=noeukaryote-4260\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/sn-mitochondrion.png?w=625&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For the new study, a team led by evolutionary biologist Anna Karnkowska, a postdoc, and her adviser, Vladimir Hampl, of Charles University in Prague,\u00a0checked another candidate, a species in the genus <em>Monocercomonoides<\/em>. The single-celled organism came from the guts of a chinchilla that belonged to one of the lab members. The team decided to test it because it belonged to a group of microbes that scientists posited had lost their mitochondria.<\/p>\n<p>When the researchers sequenced <em>Monocercomonoides<\/em>\u2019s genome, they found no signs of mitochondrial genes (the organelles carry their own DNA). Digging deeper, they determined that it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cell.com\/current-biology\/fulltext\/S0960-9822(16)30263-9\">lacks all of the key proteins that enable mitochondria to function<\/a>. \u201cThe definition of eukaryotic cells is that they have mitochondria,\u201d says Karnkowska, who is now at the University of British Columbia,\u00a0Vancouver, in Canada. \u201cWe overturn this definition.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Monocercomonoides<\/em> may not need mitochondria because of where it lives\u2014in the intestines of chinchilla hosts, which it doesn\u2019t appear to harm. Nutrients are abundant there, but oxygen, which mitochondria require to produce energy, is scarce. Instead of relying on mitochondria, the organism likely uses enzymes in its cytoplasm to break down food and furnish energy, the authors suggest. But energy production is not the only problem that <em>Monocercomonoides<\/em>solved. Mitochondria provide another cellular service: synthesizing clusters of iron and sulfur that are essential helpers for a variety of proteins. It turns out that <em>Monocercomonoides<\/em> has come up with a workaround by borrowing some bacterial genes that perform the same function, the scientists reveal online today in <em>Current Biology<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/news\/2016\/05\/first-eukaryotes-found-without-normal-cellular-power-supply\">First eukaryotes found without a normal cellular power supply<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the new study, a team led by evolutionary biologist Anna Karnkowska, a postdoc, and her adviser, Vladimir Hampl, of Charles University in Prague,\u00a0checked another candidate, a species in the genus Monocercomonoides. The single-celled organism came from the guts of a chinchilla that belonged to one of the lab members. The team decided to test [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-Wj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3617,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3615\/revisions\/3617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}