After 12 years of trying, a team in Japan has grown an organism from mud on the sea floor that they say could explain how microbes evolved into more sophisticated eukaryotes. Eukaryotes includes humans. The microbe can produce branched appendages, which may have helped it corral and envelop bacteria.
“This is the work that many people in the field have been waiting for,” says Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Scientists looked at whether calcium levels in the hippocampus, part of the brain necessary for learning and memory. Scientists developed a special strain of mice which express a calcium-sensing fluorescent protein. This allowed them to find a clear correlation between cognitive ability and pre-synaptic calcium levels.
After 12 years of trying, a team in Japan has grown an organism from mud on the sea floor that they say could explain how microbes evolved into more sophisticated eukaryotes. Eukaryotes includes humans. The microbe can produce branched appendages, which may have helped it corral and envelop bacteria.
