A Revolution In Evolution A Bacterial and Alga Love Fest

·39 min·1 clip

When we got the genome sequence, we discovered it was missing most of the machinery of normal cyanobacteria—this wasn't just symbiosis, it was something evolving into an organelle.

Dr. Jonathan Zare discusses his decades-long discovery of a revolutionary evolutionary process: a nitrogen-fixing bacterium (cyanobacterium) integrating with a marine alga to form a new organelle called the nitroplast. Starting from his 1990s research into nitrogen cycling in oceans, Zare explains how molecular biology techniques helped identify an unusual cyanobacterium. Through independent collaboration with researcher Kyoko Hagino in Japan, they realized this bacterium was becoming an organelle—a living example of endosymbiosis that represents the third documented instance of an organism evolving into a cellular compartment, similar to how mitochondria and chloroplasts originated.

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