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.
via Tentacled microbe could be missing link between simple cells and complex life | Science | AAAS.