nucleation

THEORY-1215: Besides Asgard archaea and the alphaproteobacterial ancestor of mitochondria, Myxococcota and Planctomycetota were major donors of genes to the eukaryotic lineage before its last common ancestor, in waves: Asgard first, then Planctomycetota before the mitochondrion, then the mitochondrial ancestor and Myxococcota together

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Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagsendosymbiosis, natural-sciences
SourceLIT-1561 — Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis
ExtendsTHEORY-1105 — In Bernabeu, Manzano-Morales, Marcet-Houben and Gabaldón's reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor's proteome, two bacterial phyla besides the mitochondrial ancestor, Myxococcota and Planctomycetota, each account for a share of the proteome comparable to that of Alphaproteobacteria and Asgard archaea under thresholds calibrated on those accepted partners, and stem-length distributions order the acquisitions as waves, Asgard first, then Planctomycetota, then the mitochondrial ancestor and Myxococcota together; the authors read this as serial associations with several partners, while conceding that their data cannot say whether any donor was a symbiont
Bears onQUESTION-277 — When formerly autonomous partners come to depend on one another, which of mutual dependence, reproductive cohesion, the distribution of essential functions across genomes, the host's regulatory control and the alignment of selection does each route to dependence bring about, and which of them, alone or together, make the partnership a new evolutionary individual?

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Source

Bernabeu, Manzano-Morales, Marcet-Houben & Gabaldón (2026), LIT-1561, read in full in NOTE-1237. The authors: “our data support premitochondrial waves of gene acquisitions from additional major prokaryotic donors as the most likely scenario”.

Where the evidence stands

What the paper shows, and what it does not, is THEORY-1105, Active, which this entry extends: that entry is the reading, this one the thesis. The promote_when above is THEORY-1105’s condition before the twenty-second status review promoted it, carried here unchanged, because it asks what would make the thesis true and not what the paper says.

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