It's FRANKENPLANT!
Posted on 10/13/2005 8:46:39 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
TSUKUBA, Ibaraki -- A mysterious marine microbe, half of whose individual cells eat algae like animals while the rest perform photosynthesis like plants, has been discovered, a University of Tsukuba research team said.The discovery, the first of its kind, will be carried in the U.S. magazine Science that will be published on Friday.
"I think the discovery of the 'half-animal, half-plant' microbe shows part of the process of single-cell marine microbes evolving into plants," Prof. Isao Inoue, a member of the research team, said.
(Excerpt) Read more at mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp ...
I think I ate one of those once in a Sushi bar.
pong
It's FRANKENPLANT!
I would have guessed the other way round.
cells! eat algae, like animals
cells eat algae, like animals
cells eat; algae like animals
cells eat algae-like animals
Pitcher plants and Venus Fly Traps also eat animals.
NO!!!
This is the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate!
( not sure of what the F*ck he/she is)
Kill it now!
Interesting...
Interesting. I was fascinated by diatoms in biology... one celled algae that actively swim around in glass shells.
Why? What force is it that compels molecules to organize into animal-like systems rather than plant-like systems?
If they can readily convert energy into new cells and reproduce then what difference plant or animal?
I'm still wondering why chemicals suddenly "acquire" a motivation to replicate themselves.
Why on earth do chemicals "care" if they reproduce?
A hydrogen molecule can survive forever wondering about the universe "mating" with this atom or that molecule. Why is it that somehow when it connects up with a certain group of other atoms they suddenly decide to repoduce (which takes an awful lot of energy).
How long before somebody calls it the 'missing link' of evolution.
Euglena - my first thought upon reading this. Saw my first in pond water in 1958.
No, microbes ate one another (like animals) before photosynthesis came along (i.e., plants).
Well, in the sense that the term is being used here, an "animal-like" system is just a system that eats food, whereas a "plant-like" system is a system that synthesizes sunlight. So, the reason why molecules would be organized into an animal-like system rather than a plant-like system is that they can't synthesize sunlight, so they have to eat..
If they can readily convert energy into new cells and reproduce then what difference plant or animal?
Plants can synthesize sunlight; animals can't.
I'm still wondering why chemicals suddenly "acquire" a motivation to replicate themselves.
They don't.
Why on earth do chemicals "care" if they reproduce?
They don't.
Why is it that somehow when [a hydrogen molecule] connects up with a certain group of other atoms they suddenly decide to repoduce..
They don't.
Lotsa folks here thought he was a tree, but I always knew there was something fishy about him.
A Secondary Symbiosis in Progress?
Noriko Okamoto and Isao Inouye
Algae have acquired plastids by developing an endosymbiotic relationship with either a cyanobacterium (primary endosymbiosis) or other eukaryotic algae (secondary endosymbiosis). We report a protist, which we tentatively refer to as Hatena, that hosts an endosymbiotic green algal partner but inherits it unevenly. The endosymbiosis causes drastic morphological changes to both the symbiont and the host cell architecture. This type of life cycle, in which endosymbiont integration has only partially converted the host from predator to autotroph, may represent an early stage of plastid acquisition through secondary symbiosis.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5746/287
Nice, maybe it was a similar transition period when the mitochondrion was incorporated into the eukaryotic cell.
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