A tiny cell that broke a big rule of biology

(grist.org)

65 points | by gumby 5 days ago

8 comments

  • HarHarVeryFunny 1 hour ago
    Fantastic - the nitroplast joining a pretty exclusive club there.

    Bigelowii itself seems very interesting, even without this nitrogen fixing organelle, having two completely different phases to it's life - one in a weird dodecahedral calcareous shell and one without as a mobile flagellate. Apparently it can exist and reproduce in either form, and occasionally switch forms. It took scientists a long while to realize the two forms are actually the same species.

    • egiboy 15 minutes ago
      Two phases of Bigelowii.

      Deuce Bigelowii.

      Huh.

  • pravetz259 15 minutes ago
    I'm skeptical of the "magic noodles" bit as mentioned in the article.

    The "tokoroten" noodles are just agar.

    Pretty much everyone in biology tries growing cells in agar, right? Surely that can't have been an amazing discovery?

  • ninju 1 hour ago
    Kudos to the scientists everywhere that continue to explore the mysteries of nature
  • imzadi 1 hour ago
    This is a nicely written article, which feels like a rarity lately.
  • chasil 1 hour ago
    The plastid wiki might be germane.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid

    Edit: "It was a type of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii. Hagino fondly just calls it Bigelowii."

    Is this pronounced bigggie-lowie?

    • bradrn 1 minute ago
      It’s presumably named after Henry Bigelow (like several other things in oceanography), so my guess would be /bɪɡəˈlə͡ʊwi.a͡ɪ/.
  • m3047 56 minutes ago
    CO2, you say? Human activity produces tens of percent of the bioavailable nitrogen.
  • whitten 1 hour ago
    Since computational biology is all about simulation, do the chloroplast, the mitochondria, and now the nitro-last, have definitions that could be actively simulated ?
    • dekhn 1 hour ago
      Practically speaking, while we could simulate them at a fairly approximate level, it wouldn't really tell us anything useful.
  • ahazred8ta 5 days ago
    A 20 year search leads to the discovery of the nitroplast, a nitrogen-fixing organelle hiding inside algae.