Concepts of the last eukaryotic common ancestor

@article{OMalley2019ConceptsOT,
  title={Concepts of the last eukaryotic common ancestor},
  author={Maureen A. O’Malley and Michelle M. Leger and Jeremy G. Wideman and I{\~n}aki Ruiz-Trillo},
  journal={Nature Ecology \& Evolution},
  year={2019},
  volume={3},
  pages={338-344}
}
Insight into the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) is central to any phylogeny-based reconstruction of early eukaryotic evolution. [] Key Method Here the authors examine four potential forms of LECA: an abstract phylogenetic state, a single cell, a population, and a consortium of organisms.
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It is argued that LGT poses insurmountable challenges for detailed and rich in details reconstructions and proposed a middle-ground position with the reconstruction of a slim LCA based on traits under strong pressures of Negative Natural Selection, and for the need of consilience with evidence from organismal biology and geochemistry.
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This work has shown that primitive genes for eukaryotic signature proteins, including actin and tubulin in the cytoskeleton and the ESCRT complex, which is involved in nuclear membrane formation, already existed in the genomes of archaeal species.
Genetic and genomic evolution of sexual reproduction: echoes from LECA to the fungal kingdom.
Archaeal origins of gamete fusion
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A new hypothesis on the origins of eukaryotic sex where an archaeal fusexin was repurposed to enable gamete fusion is proposed, and it is demonstrated that ectopically expressed FusexinA can fuse mammalian cells and that this process involves the additional domain and a more broadly conserved fusion loop.
Fungal Mitogenomes: Relevant Features to Planning Plant Disease Management
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The mechanisms that generate changes along mt-genomes are described, which play key roles at enlarging the ability of fungi to adapt to changing environments and will help to understand, at the molecular level, the strategies for fungal disease management.
1 ACCESSING MICROBIAL LIFEWORLDS Weird Entanglements and Strange Symbionts
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It is argued that the weirdness of the microbial world is to be found in its recalcitrance and difficulty to be contained and that an alternative ontology—that of subtending relations—may more productively encompass human-microbe relations.
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TLDR
The data suggest that the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) already contained all three types of PufSF proteins and that ‘classical’ Pufs then underwent lineage-specific expansions.
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This work has identified SNARE-like factors in the genomes of uncultured organisms of Asgard archaea of the Heimdallarchaeota clade, which are thought to be the closest living relatives of eukaryotes, and identified several genes encoding for SNARE proteins in γ-proteobacteria of the order Legionellales, pathogens that live inside eukARYotic cells.
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