The Substructure of a Typical Eukaryotic Cell

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The overwhelming majority of what we think of as multicellular organisms are in fact eukaryotes, but there are- Yeah. I mean, that's in a way what makes biology interesting, right? It's a science of exceptionalism. So you always find something that violates your perceived wisdom. Okay, good. Thank you for indulging my fairly elementary, but still difficult questions because biology is hard. You know, what's going on inside these eukaryotic cells in particular? We'll get to some of the cool ways in which they show up in the other cells also.

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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."

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.