The Evolution of Archaea

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archaea were thought to be in the main extremophiles. Now that we have the technologies to look much more sensitively in all kinds of environments, archaea are pretty much everywhere - but often in very low abundance. So you find archaea in the soil, you find vast amounts of Archaea in the sea, you find archaeas in the human gut. They're probably playing important roles there in processing the food stuff that these creatures eat.

Eukaryotic cells manage to pull off a number of remarkable feats. One is packing quite a long DNA molecule, with potentially billions of base pairs, into a tiny central nucleus. A key role is played by histones, proteins that provide scaffolding for DNA to wrap around. Histones also appear in archaea (one of the other domains of life), but until recently there wasn't evidence for them in bacteria (the final of the three domains). Todays guest, Tobias Warnecke, is an author on a recent paper that claims to provide such evidence. We discuss this new result, as well as background questions of how cells evolved and what their current structure can teach us about their histories.

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Tobias Warnecke received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Bath. He is currently a Programme Leader and MRC Investigator at the London Institute of Medical Sciences. He is a co-author on A. Hochner et al. (2023), "Histone-Organized Chromatin in Bacteria."

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