On this episode we speak with Dr. Jonathan Zehr. He and his colleagues discovered an example of evolution in action. Dr. Zehr will share with us how such a revolutionary discovery was made.
Jonathan Zehr is the distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Institute of Marine Sciences. He and his colleagues have discovered the possibility of a complex cellular organism with a nitrogen-fixing organelle derived from endosymbiosis with a nitrogen fixing bacteria. This new organelle is called a nitroplast. Studying a marine alga with a cyanobacterial endosymbiont, Zehr and his colleagues used soft x-ray tomography to visualize cell structure and division of the alga, revealing a coordinated cell cycle in which the endosymbiont divides and is split evenly, similar to the situation for plastids and mitochondria in these cells. In other words instead of having a symbiotic relationship, the alga and bacteria integrated to form a newly evolved organism. Dr. Zehr, welcome to the program. We can’t wait to hear more about this revolutionary discovery.
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