The origin of mitochondria was a major evolutionary transition leading to eukaryotes, and is a hotly debated issue. It is unknown whether mitochondria were acquired early or late, and whether it was captured via phagocytosis or syntrophic integration. We present dynamical models to directly simulate the emergence of mitochondria in an ecoevolutionary context. Our results show that regulated far...

Endosymbiosis is widespread among cnidarians and is of high ecological relevance. The tropical sea anemone Aiptasia sp. is a laboratory model system for endosymbiosis between reef-building corals and photosynthetic dinoflagellate algae of the genus Symbiodinium. Here we identify the key environmental cues to induce reproducible spawning in Aiptasia under controlled laboratory conditions. We fin...

Diatoms and other chromalveolates are among the dominant phytoplankters in the world's oceans. Endosymbiosis was essential to the success of chromalveolates, and it appears that the ancestral plastid in this group had a red algal origin via an ancient secondary endosymbiosis. However, recent analyses have turned up a handful of nuclear genes in chromalveolates that are of green algal derivation...

All morphologically complex life on Earth, beyond the level of cyanobacteria, is eukaryotic. All eukaryotes share a common ancestor that was already a complex cell. Despite their biochemical virtuosity, prokaryotes show little tendency to evolve eukaryotic traits or large genomes. Here I argue that prokaryotes are constrained by their membrane bioenergetics, for fundamental reasons relating to ...

Carcinogenesis occurs through a series of steps from normal into benign and finally malignant phenotype. This cancer evolutionary trajectory has been accompanied by similar metabolic transformation from normal metabolism into Pasteur and/or Crabtree-Effects into Warburg-Effect and finally Cannibalism and/or Lactate-Symbiosis. Due to lactate production as an end-product of glycolysis, tumor colo...

O ne thing plant cells can’t afford to get wrong is chloroplast division. The successful splitting and passing on of chloroplasts to daughter cells is vital to plant cell survival. Indeed, plants (and their progenitors the green algae) have been dividing and passing down their endosymbiotic chloroplasts successfully from generation to generation since the establishment of the chloroplast many h...

Plastids--the light-harvesting machines of plant and algal cells--evolved from cyanobacteria inside a eukaryotic host more than a billion years ago. New data reveal that a mysterious unicellular alga acquired its photosynthetic apparatus much more recently than other eukaryotes, affording a second look at the primary endosymbiotic origin of plastids.

Gene transfer is a major contributing factor to functional innovation in genomes. Endosymbiotic gene transfer (EGT) is a specific instance of lateral gene transfer (LGT) in which genetic materials are acquired by the host genome from an endosymbiont that has been engulfed and retained in the cytoplasm. Here we present a comprehensive approach for detecting gene transfer within a phylogenetic fr...

The nuclear genomes of photosynthetic eukaryotes are littered with genes derived from the cyanobacterial progenitor of modern-day plastids. A genomic analysis of Cyanophora paradoxa - a deeply diverged unicellular alga - suggests that the abundance and functional diversity of nucleus-encoded genes of cyanobacterial origin differs in plants and algae.

The chloroplasts of photosynthetic eukaryotes arose more than 1.6 billion years ago (Yoon et al., 2004) through the process of primary endosymbiosis, in which a cyanobacterium became permanently integrated into a heterotrophic mitochondriate eukaryote (Reyes-Prieto et al., 2007). Through subsequent secondary and tertiary endosymbioses (i.e. additional nested endosymbioses between plastid-bearin...