Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

https://www.quantamagazine.org/primitive-asgard-cells-show-life-on-the-brink-of-complexity-20230411/

by nsoonhui • 3 years ago

118 58 3 years ago

taxerbee1• 3 years ago

A new study published in the journal Nature sheds light on the evolution of complex life from newly discovered "Asgard Cells"! Go science... love the science of evolution, so fascinating!

So it seems like these Asgard Cells are complex cells that evolved on Earth over 1.8 billion years ago. These cells have features similar to both bacteria and eukaryotes, which are the two main types of cellular life on Earth. The discovery provides insight into the evolution of eukaryotic cells, which are believed to have originated from a symbiotic relationship between two different types of bacteria. As we go further and further back in time, chemical and biology evolution merges :)

baremetal7• 3 years ago

Where did the entropy in the genome of any species come from? The data man, where did it come from?

When everything in the universe degrades or rusts or tends towards decreasing complexity.

Edit: When I say entropy the first time I'm referring to algorithmic information theory entropy, whereas the second indirect reference is to physical entropy.

meindnoch2• 3 years ago

It came from the energy that the Sun pumps into the system.

mromanuk• 3 years ago

Life it's just a cooler way to speed up entropy.

COGlory2• 3 years ago

I would encourage you to find a copy of (it's very expensive, but there are methods to acquire it, such as "libraries") Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance", if this is a topic you're interested in. It basically goes through evolution from a molecular biology and information theory standpoint (and culminates in his own theory of "genesis").

FeepingCreature• 3 years ago

Randomization plus selection.

The big innovation of life is having a form of matter that can quine its own arrangement. Once you have that, the complexity that ensued was predictable.

Qem• 3 years ago

It comes from Death's sickle, prunning the random noise introduced by mutations to generate useful information. Natural selection. There's a paper where people put bounds in terms of bits/generation a species can acquire over time. Apparently sex developed as a workaround life found to inclease this bandwidth from about 1 bit/generation to much larger values: http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/gene.pdf

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

Not quite, they have features of similar both typical archaea and eukaryotes, but living in close symbiosis with bacteria. We already pretty much knew that eukaryotes came from an archaea/bacteria merger, we're just much closer to figuring out how that happened.

haxxbro• 3 years ago

Implications for the search for extraterrestrial life! The unusually unique features of the cells suggest that it MAY have evolved elsewhere in the universe.

anonymouskimmer6• 3 years ago

We're all very much mixed at this point. But think of the other possibility: That the ancestor of the archaea lineage evolved on Earth while the ancestor of the bacterial lineage came from space.

ch4s32• 3 years ago

while the ancestor of the bacterial lineage came from space.

I don't believe this is supported by evidence. Finding a few organic molecules in a meteorite is pretty thin, and as Carl Sagan pointed out the lethal doses of radiation in space make panspermia highly unlikely.

dan-robertson• 3 years ago

What about the similarity of their dna to other superphyla?

Kaijo• 3 years ago

The genomic studies described in the article clearly show the phylogenetic relationship of Asgard archaea to other archaea and thus better resolve their place on Earth's singular tree of life. The excitement is over their potential to resolve the deep branching structure of that tree. They plausibly share a most recent common ancestor with all eukaryotes and in some sense represent an evolutionary grade of transition towards eukaryotes. It's also exciting that some strains have been maintained in pure culture for the first time, so that we can rule out the findings as being merely artefacts of metagenomic sequencing methods.

How did you to get aliens from this?

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

I think the speed at which the first life evolved on Earth but the painful slowness with which photosynthesis, eukaryotes, and complex life evolved on Earth make me optimistic about finding life forms but pessimistic about finding intelligent beings.

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

No, you’re falling for the creator fallacy.

“How could something so complex have started here? There must be a wizard who made it on rigel 7”

But who made the wizard?

“…”

The problem is, if it could have been created elsewhere then it could have been created here. It’s a meaningless statement. It’s like saying “no she didn’t shoot him, she called a man from mexico and he flew over and pulled the trigger and then gave her the gun and flew back”, you’re just making something up and adding random extra complexity with no evidence.

dav_Oz• 3 years ago

While the new evidence/discovery itself can be quickly summarized:

Within the now-dominant two-domain picture to which the Asgard archaea are contributing, the big story of life on this planet goes something like this. Some 4 billion years ago, life forked into two single-celled branches, the archaea and the bacteria. Genetic evidence implies that the two branches crossed again 2 billion years later when an archaeon — likely from the Asgard group — somehow ingested a bacterium. The process domesticated what was once a distinct, free-living cell and turned it into the organelles called mitochondria that persist inside eukaryotic cells. The descendants of that fateful union branched into other single-celled organisms like dinoflagellates, and then later into multicellular creatures that grew to macroscopic sizes, left fossils behind, and colonized both sea and land.

What stands out for me the most throughout the article, however, is the hostile environment and over-competitiveness "slowing down" the already painstakingly slow research itself (acknowledged by all parties):

Now a high-stakes, slow-motion race is on as labs around the world attempt to grow their own Asgard cultures. Samples aren’t shared; growth strategies are tightly guarded secrets. “We were honestly shocked” when the Schleper team’s results came out, wrote Hiroyuki Imachi, the microbiologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology who, after a grueling 12-year effort, isolated the first and currently only other Asgard archaea sample.
Meanwhile, in Schleper’s lab in Austria, the initial six-year grant was dwindling and no new funding was in sight. One postdoc assigned to the task of growing the organism had ended up leaving science. Another team member, a technician, had pipetted so much they needed surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome.
Still, labs around the world are gambling that bringing more diverse representatives of the Asgard group into cultivation will yield a bonanza of new clues about their — and our — common ancestor. Schleper is trying. So is Ettema. So is Baum, who said his lab is soon welcoming a new colleague who will bring vials of archaea from groups like Heimdall and Odin. So is Imachi, who declined to speak to Quanta for this story. “If I were to be interviewed by you now, I would most likely talk about new data that has not yet been published,” he explained in an email, adding that his group applauded the Schleper team’s efforts. “It is very competitive now (although I do not like this kind of competition),” he added.

Other sources also bemoaned the overly pressurized atmosphere. “It would be nice if the field would be more open to sharing,” Spang said. The pressure weighs heaviest on the young scientists who tend to take on the high-risk, high-reward cultivation projects. Success can add a glowing Nature paper to their resume. But wasting years on a failed effort can stunt their chances of ever getting a job in science. “It’s really an unfair situation,” Schleper said.

anonymouskimmer6• 3 years ago

What stands out for me the most throughout the article, however, is the hostile environment and over-competitiveness "slowing down" the already painstakingly slow research itself (acknowledged by all parties):

We need monetary awards and recognition for sharing techniques. And we need better structures for credentialing people in the sciences. Students with theses which did not work, but which demonstrated good science, should still be awarded doctorates, and in a timely manner without having to exhaust themselves until nearly impossible tasks are accomplished. This is self-evident. I can only think of chauvinism as a reason to not do it this way. Chauvinism and glory hogging.

tudorw• 3 years ago

That was the biggest takeaway for me too, what a lot of duplicated effort and lost opportunities competition can bring.

layer8• 3 years ago

The title gives me Stargate flashbacks.

7thaccount• 3 years ago

Except I doubt their cloned cells would be anything so primitive:)

beebeepka• 3 years ago

They perished because of their cloning practices.

Clearly they should have asked humans for the sort of help they needed with the replicators. We could've provided plenty of our primitive DNA. Wait, were there any female Asgard?

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

A pretty important piece of evidence on how the first eukaryotes came about. The two big schools of though were previously that symbiosis happened first before they merged or that the bacteria started out as a parasite living inside the archaea before developing symbiosis. The evidence for the later is that the bacterial ancestor of mitochondria seems to have been in the order Rickettsiales which contains the cell parasite that causes Typhus in humans. But seeing a species so similar to the arachea parent of the first eukaryotes in close symbiosis with bacteria seems stronger evidence the other way. It's not quite the classic hydrogen hypothesis[1] symbiosis but it's the similar.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_hypothesis

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Mitochondria didn't really become advantageous until free oxygen began to increase... so maybe the chloroplast and oxygenic photosynthesis were the more important developments in terms of the evolution of complex life?

Perhaps mitochondria were a key partner to chloroplasts, but I wonder which came first? Or maybe just the free-living chloroplasts were capable of raising oxygen levels, once they'd figured out how to prevent themselves from being oxidized by their own waste products.

Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

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