The discovery of a rare occurrence in the evolutionary history of life on Earth has sent shockwaves through the scientific community. For the first time in over a billion years, two lifeforms have merged to form a single organism through primary endosymbiosis. This unique process, where one organism engulfs another to form an internal organelle, offers valuable insights into evolution and has the potential to revolutionize agriculture.
The merging of these two lifeforms occurred between an ocean-dwelling algae species and a bacterium. Tyler Coale, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led one of the studies that uncovered this phenomenon. He emphasized the significance of this event in the history of complex life on Earth and the potential for engineering similar organelles into crop plants to improve nitrogen fixation.
This collaborative effort involving scientists from MIT, UC Santa Cruz, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and universities in Japan and Spain resulted in groundbreaking discoveries that were published in esteemed scientific journals Science and Cell. The second event resulting from this process led to the emergence of plants on Earth. With this newfound knowledge, scientists are hopeful that they can use this process to create more sustainable and efficient ways of farming crops that could benefit millions worldwide.