Genome Sequencing Complete On Naegleria Gruberi Amoeba Naegleria
genome sheds light on transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes
In the long evolutionary road from bacteria to humans, a major
milestone occurred some 1.5 billion years ago when microbes
started building closets for all their stuff, storing DNA inside
a nucleus, for example, or cramming all the energy machinery
inside mitochondria. Scientists have now sequenced the genome of
a weird, single-celled organism called Naegleria gruberi that is
telling biologists about that transition from prokaryotes, which
function just fine with all their proteins floating around in a
soup, to eukaryotes, which neatly compartmentalize those
proteins? The sequence, produced by the Department of Energy
Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and an analysis by scientists from
the University of California, Berkeley, Lancaster University in
the United Kingdom and institutions elsewhere in the United
States and the U.K. are published in the March 5 issue of the
journal Cell. "In