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Scientists Re-Create the Conditions That Sparked Complex Life
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab.
Gabriel Giger, lead author on the paper and Vorholt’s graduate student, started by cooking up a cocktail of enzymes to soften the wall. By re-creating a natural relationship, Vorholt and Giger have “rerun that tape of evolution,” Richards said, to learn lessons about how endosymbiosis happens. “I can imagine that in protists and other groups that have not been well studied, we will find many new patterns of how symbiosis is supported,” said Laila Partida Martínez, who discovered the rice seedling–blight endosymbiosis and is now director of Cinvestav Irapuato, a plant science research institute in Mexico.
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