Energide–cell body as smallest unit of eukaryotic life

Organization of the Smallest Eukaryotic Spindle

In metazoans, plants, and fungi, the spindle checkpoint delays mitosis until each chromosome is attached to one or more of its own kinetochore microtubules (kMTs). Some unicellular eukaryotes, however, have been reported to have fewer kMTs than chromosomes [1-5]. If this is the case, it is unclear how the spindle checkpoint could be satisfied. In the vast majority of the previous studies, mitot...

The Smallest Arithmetic Logic Unit

There have been many designs for „small universal computers“. The Turing machine (1936), for example, remains unsurpassed: it consists only of memory, and a small processor with a few number of internal states. The memory can be designed to store only binary digits (0 and 1) and the number of states can be minimized. Scheming minimal universal Turing machines has been a mental sport for years [1].

Inside nature's smallest black body

Sonoluminescence is the intriguing phenomenon of strong light flashes from tiny bubbles in a liquid [1]. These bubbles are driven by an ultrasonic wave and need to be filled with noble gas atoms. The spectrum of the emitted light corresponds to very high temperatures [2] and hints the presence of an hot opaque plasma core [3]. Although sonoluminescence has been studied extensively, the origin o...

Debunking the Smallest Salable Unit Theory

Cryptic sex in the smallest eukaryotic marine green alga.

Ostreococcus spp. are common worldwide oceanic picoeukaryotic pelagic algae. The complete genomes of three strains from different ecological niches revealed them to represent biologically distinct species despite their identical cellular morphologies (cryptic species). Their tiny genomes (13 Mb), with approximately 20 chromosomes, are colinear and densely packed with coding sequences, but no se...