Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have discovered a single-celled organism capable of forming structures very similar to embryos, which could answer the old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first, in favor of the former.
For this discovery, the UNIGE team studied Chromosfera perkinsii, a single-celled organism discovered in marine sediments in Hawaii in 2017 and present on Earth for more than a billion years, long before the first animals, always multicellular, appeared.
The experts observed that when the cell that forms the perkinsii chromosphere reaches its maximum size, it divides but always maintains its original size, forming multicellular colonies that resemble the embryonic development of animalsas explained on Wednesday in a UNIGE statement.
These colonies persist for about a third of that organism’s life cycle and comprise at least two different types of cells, a phenomenon that the researchers define as surprising for that form of life.
“It is a unicellular species, but its behavior shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present.long before animals appeared on Earth,” highlighted biochemistry professor Omaya Dudin, who led the study.
“The observations suggest that the genetic programs responsible for embryonic development were already present before the appearance of animal life,” concludes the research, published in the specialized journal Nature.
The UNIGE team scientists clarify, however, that Another possible explanation is that the single-celled organism may have evolved independently over millions of years. until embryos can develop.
One of the great unsolved enigmas in Biology is how unicellular organisms evolved into multicellular organisms, the latter with embryonic developments that always follow very similar phases, regardless of the species.
According to UNIGE, the results of this research can support previous research on 600 million-year-old fossils with structures also similar to those of embryos, and which have already questioned traditional conceptions of multicellular life.
Source: Observadora
