New spheres of knowledge on the origin of life

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 22:49:36 GMT
Space Daily

Tsukuba, Japan (SPX) Jan 13, 2022 The shape of a cell affects its physical and chemical properties...

The shape of a cell affects its physical and chemical properties.

Different cell types have developed different shapes to enable effective functioning.

What shape were the very first cells, as life began to evolve?

Primitive cells are thought to have been spherical, but experimental evidence supporting this belief remains elusive.

The team therefore mimicked primordial conditions by growing six different lineages of cells in an environment where the only available nutrient was oleic-acid vesicles, rather than the more usual glucose sugar.

"Our team grew these bacteria in an OAV environment and found that as the cells better adapted to the new conditions, they grew more quickly, became spherical, and decreased in both size and area-to-volume ratio compared with the original parent cells," says senior author Professor Bei-Wen Ying.

"Even when we relocated these evolved cells to a glucose environment, they maintained their new spherical shape."

The six different lineages of Evo cells all evolved to adapt to the OAV conditions without common mutations.

Notably, two distinct strategies were observed: some cells developed mutations that directly targeted the cell wall so that the cell structure became spherical, while others accumulated mutations in other biological processes.

This work is the first to show typically rod-shaped cells shifting to a spherical shape in a primordial-like environment, supporting the theory that when life began to evolve, the earliest primitive cells were spherical.

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