An alga’s bacterial symbiote has evolved into an organelle that turns atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, making the alga unique among eukaryotes.
It’s time to welcome a new type of cell to the club of living things that can harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere.
One such bacteria, dubbed UCYN-A, is widely distributed in the world’s oceans and is important to oceanic nitrogen fixation, says marine ecologist Jonathan Zehr of the University of California, Santa Cruz. These bacteria are also known to be symbionts living within the unicellular algaeHowever, the line between symbiont and organelle can be fuzzy. Zehr and colleagues set out to better understand where UCYN-A falls on that spectrum.
Researchers found that nitroplasts arrange themselves and divide just like any other organelle in the algal cell. Shown here is a series of soft X-ray tomography images illustrating cell and organelle division in the host algal cell . Light purple are chloroplasts, dark purple is the algal cell nucleus, green are mitochondria and cyan is the nitroplast.
The researchers argue that all these features show UCYN-A isn’t merely a symbiont but has evolved into an organelle: the nitroplast.
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