Veterinarian Finds Evolutionary Link Between Humans and Bacteria
We higher forms of life have always distinguished ourselves from our single-celled microscopic friends. After all, we have a brain and a more interesting sex life. And we have organelles, tiny structures that are the basic workhorses inside complex cells. Organelles have their own membranes and perform such functions as producing energy or gobbling up foreign invaders. Such luxuries don’t normally go to a single cell.
Or so we thought. This year Roberto Docampo, a professor of veterinary pathobiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which causes crown gall disease in plants, does indeed have organelles. His discovery muddies the distinction between eukaryotes (organisms with nuclei in their cells) and prokaryotes (single-celled life-forms without nuclei). It also sheds light on how eukaryotes and prokaryotes evolved.
Docampo was hardly the first to notice that prokaryotes have ...
