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The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized

All modern multicellular life — all life that any of us regularly see — is made of cells with a knack for compartmentalization. Recent discoveries are revealing how the first eukaryote got its start.

And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that assemble proteins, store water, turn sunlight into energy, digest biomolecules, get rid of waste, and more. “They’ve got the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, peroxisomes, lysosomes, vacuoles — all this machinery not present in bacteria or archaea cells,” said Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. It first evolved into a smattering of unique unicellular creatures, such as the ancestors of modern diplomonads, which swim with dual tail clusters, and the parasitic microsporidians, which shoot out coiled tubes to infect victim cells.

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