Author: Tina Hesman Saey / Source: Science News
Yeast intentionally stuffed with bacteria may teach scientists something about the origins of cells’ powerhouses.
Cellular power-generating organelles, called mitochondria, are thought to have once been bacteria captured by archaea, single-celled microbes that are one of the earliest forms of life. Now, almost all eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus) contain mitochondria. At first, the bacteria may have lived inside archaea as endosymbionts, independent organisms that cooperate with their hosts. Over time, mitochondria lost many of their genes and eventually became an integral part of the cell.
This scenario has support from genetics. But “if you really want to prove something’s true,” says chemical biologist Peter Schultz, researchers should be able to make something similar in the lab. So Schultz, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and his colleagues created a hybrid cell by fusing two popular lab organisms — the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a common gut bacteria called E. coli.
“It’s a pioneering approach,” says evolutionary biologist Antonio Lazcano of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, who was not involved in the experiments. No one has made such a hybrid organism before. But the work, described October 29 in the Proceedings of the…
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