Scientists Witness Rare Evolutionary Event: Algae and Bacterium Merge to Form Single Organism

Sign up for our Voices Dispatches email to receive a full digest of the best opinions of the week. You can also subscribe to our free weekly Voices newsletter for more insightful content.

In a rare occurrence that has only happened twice in Earth’s history, two lifeforms have merged to form a single organism through a process known as primary endosymbiosis. An international team of scientists recently witnessed this evolutionary event between an ocean-dwelling algae species and a bacterium, where the algae engulfed the bacterium to form an internal organelle. This unique process offers valuable insights into evolution and has the potential to revolutionize agriculture.

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. The research papers detailing these findings were published in two esteemed scientific journals: Science and Cell.

The collaborative efforts of scientists from various institutions such as MIT, UC Santa Cruz, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and universities in Japan and Spain were instrumental in unraveling this groundbreaking discovery.