Explorations / The history of the cell / Part 5 of 7
The cell that swallowed a bacterium
How the mitochondria in your cells began as free-living bacteria, and how we know. 6 scenes.
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Part 1, A planet without life, is open to everyone.
- TodayTwo cells in one
- Roughly 2 billion years agoBefore
- Roughly 2 billion years agoTaken in
- Over many generationsA partnership
- TodayThe evidence
- More than a billion years agoIt happened again
Practise this 7.3Evidence for EvolutionBiology →7.4Common Ancestry and Phylogenetic TreesBiology →
Part 4 · Oxygen changes everything: coming Part 6 · Many cells: coming
The history of the cell, in order
- A planet without life
- The first cells· locked
- Two kinds of simple cell· coming
- Oxygen changes everything· coming
- The cell that swallowed a bacterium
- Many cells· coming
- The tree today· coming
- Lynn Sagan (1967). On the origin of mitosing cells. Journal of Theoretical Biology 14(3): 255–274.
- John M. Archibald (2015). Endosymbiosis and eukaryotic cell evolution. Current Biology 25: R911–R921.
- Andrew J. Roger, Sergio A. Muñoz-Gómez and Ryoma Kamikawa (2017). The origin and diversification of mitochondria. Current Biology 27: R1177–R1192.
- Lanyun Miao, Zongjun Yin, Andrew H. Knoll, Yuangao Qu and Maoyan Zhu (2024). 1.63-billion-year-old multicellular eukaryotes from the Chuanlinggou Formation in North China. Science Advances 10: eadk3208.