ABOVE: Scientists collected deep-sea mud from Omine Ridge off the Japanese coast using the manned submersible Shinkai 6500.
OAR/NATIONAL UNDERSEA RESEARCH PROGRAM (NURP), JAMSTEC
An elusive marine microbe, once known only by its DNA, has finally been cultured in the lab and could grant hints as to how eukaryotic life originated, researchers reported August 8 in a preprint posted to bioRxiv. The single-cell organism grows branching appendages and contains eukaryote-like genes, though it belongs to the domain Archaea.
“This is a monumental paper that reflects a tremendous amount of work and perseverance,” says Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who was not involved in this study, in an interview with Nature. “We’ve learnt a lot from the genome, but without a lab culture, we can only learn so much.”
In 2015, Ettema and his colleagues spotted samples of the mysterious microbes in mud collected near Loki’s ...
