Endosymbiosis and eukaryotic cell evolution

John M. Archibald

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.055

Endosymbiosis and eukaryotic cell evolution

John M. Archibald

Medicine

Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article › peer-review

428 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Understanding the evolution of eukaryotic cellular complexity is one of the grand challenges of modern biology. It has now been firmly established that mitochondria and plastids, the classical membrane-bound organelles of eukaryotic cells, evolved from bacteria by endosymbiosis. In the case of mitochondria, evidence points very clearly to an endosymbiont of α-proteobacterial ancestry. The precise nature of the host cell that partnered with this endosymbiont is, however, very much an open question. And while the host for the cyanobacterial progenitor of the plastid was undoubtedly a fully-fledged eukaryote, how - and how often - plastids moved from one eukaryote to another during algal diversification is vigorously debated. In this article I frame modern views on endosymbiotic theory in a historical context, highlighting the transformative role DNA sequencing played in solving early problems in eukaryotic cell evolution, and posing key unanswered questions emerging from the age of comparative genomics.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	R911-R921
Journal	Current Biology
Volume	25
Issue number	19
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.055
Publication status	Published - Oct 5 2015

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
I thank Daniel Moog, Sven Gould, and Jan de Vries for helpful discussion, and William Martin, Klaus Kowallik and Jan Sapp for published translations. Apologies are made to those whose primary research could not be cited due to space constraints. Research on endosymbiosis in the Archibald Lab is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Centre for Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Bioinformatics at Dalhousie University. J.M.A. acknowledges long-term support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

General Neuroscience
General Biochemistry,Genetics and Molecular Biology
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.055

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Endosymbiosis and eukaryotic cell evolution

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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