A Revolution In Evolution A Bacterial and Alga Love Fest
Description
On this episode we speak with Dr. Jonathan Zehr. He and his colleagues discovered an example of evolution in action. Dr. Zehr will share with us how such a revolutionary discovery was made.
Jonathan Zehr is the distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Institute of Marine Sciences. He and his colleagues have discovered the possibility of a complex cellular organism with a nitrogen-fixing organelle derived from endosymbiosis with a nitrogen fixing bacteria. This new organelle is called a nitroplast. Studying a marine alga with a cyanobacterial endosymbiont, Zehr and his colleagues used soft x-ray tomography to visualize cell structure and division of the alga, revealing a coordinated cell cycle in which the endosymbiont divides and is split evenly, similar to the situation for plastids and mitochondria in these cells. In other words instead of having a symbiotic relationship, the alga and bacteria integrated to form a newly evolved organism. Dr. Zehr, welcome to the program. We can’t wait to hear more about this revolutionary discovery.
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