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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.
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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).
So, your problem is with the fact that it doesn't match any known organism, because we don't know what else might be out there?
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.
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.