Mysterious New Organism Found In Mono Lake Could Rewrite The History Of Life
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The salty, arsenic- and cyanide-laced waters of the Eastern Sierra Nevada's Mono Lake is an extremely hostile environment. Aside from the abundant brine shrimp and black clouds of alkali flies, very few organisms live there.
Now, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have discovered a new creature lurking in the lake's briny shallows - one that could tell scientists about the origin of animals more than 650 million years ago.
The organism is a choanoflagellate, a microscopic, single-celled form of life that can divide and develop into multicellular colonies in a way that's similar to how animal embryos form. It's not a type of animal, however, but a member of a sister group to all animals. As animals' closest living relative, the choanoflagellate is a crucial model for the leap from one-celled to multicellular life.
Surprisingly, it harbors its own microbiome, making it the first choanoflagellate known to establish a stable physical relationship with bacteria, instead of solely eating them. As such, it's one of the simplest organisms known to have a microbiome.
Very little is known about choanoflagellates, and there are interesting biological phenomena that we can only gain insight into if we understand their ecology," said Nicole King, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator who studies choanoflagellates as a model for what early life was like in ancient oceans.
Typically visible only through a microscope, choanoflagellates are often ignored by aquatic biologists, who instead focus on macroscopic animals, photosynthetic algae, or bacteria. But their biology and lifestyle can give insight into creatures that existed in the oceans before animals evolved and that eventually gave rise to animals. This species in particular could shed light on the origin of interactions between animals and bacteria that led to the human microbiome.
Animals evolved in oceans that were filled with bacteria," King said. If you think about the tree of life, all organisms that are alive now are related to each other through evolutionary time. So if we study organisms that are alive today, then we can reconstruct what happened in the past."
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