Bill Martin studied biology at Texas A&M and the University of Hannover. He did his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne under the generous supervision of Heinz Saedler, who discovered the transposons known as IS elements. After fi nishing his PhD in 1988, he did his postdoctoral work on chloroplastcytosol isoenzymes, endosymbiosis, and gene transfer at the Universit...

Understanding the evolution of eukaryotic cellular complexity is one of the grand challenges of modern biology. It has now been firmly established that mitochondria and plastids, the classical membrane-bound organelles of eukaryotic cells, evolved from bacteria by endosymbiosis. In the case of mitochondria, evidence points very clearly to an endosymbiont of α-proteobacterial ancestry. The preci...

Facilitating the evolution of new gene functions, gene duplication is a major mechanism driving evolutionary innovation. Gene family expansions relevant to host/symbiont interactions are increasingly being discovered in eukaryotes that host endosymbiotic microbes. Such discoveries entice speculation that gene duplication facilitates the evolution of novel, endosymbiotic relationships. Here, usi...

The origin of photosynthetic organelles via endosymbiosis more than 1 Gya ago was a major detonator of eukaryotic diversification. The evolution of a stable endosymbiotic relationship between eukaryotic cells and photosynthetic cyanobacteria involved series of cellular and molecular processes that are not entirely understood. Critical steps toward the evolution of plastids occurred when the hos...

Plastids utilize a complex gene expression machinery, which has coevolved with the underlying genome sequence. Relatively, little is known about the genome-wide evolution of transcript processing in algal plastids that have undergone complex endosymbiotic events. We present the first genome-wide study of transcript processing in a plastid acquired through serial endosymbiosis, in the fucoxanthi...