The Evolution of Eukaryotes

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The evolutionary relationship between these three kingdoms we have here is not settled. But it's certainly very active and the activity comes from the discovery that happened around the mid-2000s of some archaea called asgada care. And if you, again, try to reconstruct the ancestral relationships between eukaryotes, archaea, and bacteria, it turns out they seem to be more closely related to eukaryote than any of the other archaea previously known.

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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