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Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Discovered
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered a benign algae eating protozoan in a lake near Oslo, Norway whose gene sequence does not match any known organism living on earth today, and this beasty combines genetic characteristics across plant, animal, and fungal kingdoms. It is believed to be the closest living organism to the original organisms that spawned all animal life on earth."
So what's the /. UID of this thing?
Here's the paper.
And to ruin all of the surprise: it's believed to be about a billion years removed from other known protists. That's about the same age as multicellular life. Archaea are more distant from us than these protists.
This is more baseless conjecture than anything, but its blend of unusual genes most likely suggests that it is the sole (optimized) survivor of a larger ecosystem of similar strains, which may have exchanged DNA through some horizontal gene transfer mechanism in the past. The relatedness to a distant organism in Tibet implies that at least one of these species was once geographically ubiquitous, or spread through some other means, and may have blended into its surroundings there.
The measurement of the organism's "age" is based on the sequence of an extremely conserved gene that codes for a part of a very important cell component, the ribosome. That measurement reflects how many times the sequence has been altered since it last matched a suspected common ancestor with its nearest relatives. The researchers never said that it's been essentially the same organism for a billion years (although it looks that way in the summary and MSNBC article); since they only analysed live samples, not fossilized ones, there's no way of knowing (and I'd be sceptical about any claims that said we could sequence billion-year-old DNA.) At any rate, analytical genomics shows us that for the sequence to stay the same for so long, the environment would have to be completely static and the genes very specifically optimised, which was almost certainly not the case due to historical climate trends. The rate of sequence change is very reliable on a large scale.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Nah, we already know what fruit the Tree of Life gave. It's the banana—haven't you seen the totally informative and 100% factual explanation of how perfect it is?
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I eagerly await to see how many moderators and respondents do not realise that this post is sarcastic.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I think from tfs, it is safe to say it is not a new form of life...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It doesn't use either. But it has acid for blood, it is very fast and aggressive and requires a host for breeding. Also, its DNA is shaped like a pyramid in a fashion that resembles the pyramids of all known civilizations.
I can't say I know a great deal about this area but it strikes me that "gene sequence does not match any known organism living on earth today" is not appropriate, seeing as we know so very little about what is crawling around the deepest parts of our oceans. It could well be this Norwegian fellow is quite ordinary.
It might be a basal eukaryote, but that does not make it basal life, i.e. bacteria and archaea were present on Earth for ~2 billion years before eukaryotes came about..
It's not even a new discovery - it was discovered late 19th century, i.e. more than a century ago. And not in Norway either.
What the Norwegian scientists do is study them closer, using a local lake as a source.
So, another Slashdot summary that's dead wrong. It can't get any worse without a bikini clad lady on page six.
They compared its genome with those in hundreds of databases around the world, with little luck. In all that looking they "have only found a partial match with a gene sequence in Tibet.
Is it part of the Rinpoche system? The next Dali Lama perhaps?
Silence is a state of mime.
Why would that be neat? Wanna keep it for a pet? Wanna show the neighbors that you're "cultured?"
Life probably didn't evolve orgasms until way later. There's not much excitement to be had in cellular division.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
From The Herp Derp Summary:
this beasty combines genetic characteristics across plant, animal, and fungal kingdoms
This is never actually mentioned in the article, in fact...
From TFA (emphasis mine):
They found it doesn't genetically fit into any of the previously discovered kingdoms of life. It's an organism with membrane-bound internal structures, called a eukaryote, but genetically it isn't an animal, plant, fungi, algae or protist (the five main groups of eukaryotes).
To me, at least, that doesn't say that it necessarily has characteristics from all of those kingdoms, and certainly doesn't imply that it "combines" them.
[music]...breakin' up is hard to do... [/music]
1.Assuming we all evolved from a universal common ancestor we are all equidistant to the original tree of life
That depends entirely on your metric. If it's by years, we're equidistant. If it's by genetic difference, we're pretty far away from the origin, and this things pretty close. If it's by generations, we're pretty close, and it's pretty far away. (Human mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of decades, primitive cellular culture mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of seconds.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
...benign algae eating protozoan...
So was it: ...) ...) ... [newspaper headline style])
1) a protozoan that eats benign algae (a benign-algae-eating protozoan
2) a benign protozoan that eats algae (a benign, algae-eating protozoan
3) a benign algae that was observed eating a protozoan (a benign algae, eating protozoan,
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The funny thing is that this literalism is very recent. As per my sig, quoting Tennyson, educated Victorians were already familiar with an enormously expanded timescale and the idea of replacement of species (he was writing in 1844, before Darwin published). And at school we used to sing that Victorian hymn which included the words "A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone" - English protestants had no trouble at all with the idea that the "days" of Genesis were metaphorical
Whether the original writers thought that, of course, is moot. But who did you believe in the early 1800s - a nomadic goat herder or the clever young men at Cambridge who were making such exciting discoveries? And why do apparently educated Americans claim to believe something that was shown to be false over 200 years ago?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Evolution is not directional, that is aiming toward a particular goal, say humans. It goes in both directions, both complexifying and simplifying in order to occupy all the ecological niches it can. Parasites and viruses may be examples of simplification of more complete organisms at one time. The organism in this article may be a simplification of a eukaryote too. Then maybe not.
The whole taking the six days literally thing is a Protestant error.
Especially when you consider that there was no "evening and morning" for the seventh day. This adds more support to the day-age interpretation of Genesis 1. God has rested; have you joined him in his rest?
To compound this, there were no "sons of Adam" to act as witnesses to the creation. Where did that knowledge come from?
If you believe tradition, the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses... But he didn't live through Genesis. How did he come to all that knowledge? He could have abridged other writings, but that still doesn't explain the account of the creation. The explanation that makes the most sense? He (or someone else) was told by God or by an angelic messenger. Therein lies the rub.
God has a habit of being intentionally obtuse at times. Every time someone receives a vision in their dreams, and every time a parable is told, there is someone present who will understand the symbolism. Yet most of the time, the message will go right over everyone else's head. One of the great problems with interpreting the Bible has to do with which passages are meant literally, and which are figurative. Most of the time, it's rather obvious, but there's always someone who will get it wrong. With Genesis, it's actually quite hard.
The question isn't: is the creation account symbolic? The question is: How much of the creation account is symbolic, and of what?
(Those who believe every word of the Bible is literal, really should reread the parables of Christ and the dreams interpreted by Daniel. Then they can try to explain why 100% of the other dreams and sayings recorded are all literal.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Very little evil has been done in the name of atheism. Not even the atrocities of the soviet union and china are done for atheism. They were done for the communist faith, or more accurately the faith in absolute personal authority held by the madmen who came to power.