Contrary to the Hobbesian schema of survival by a war of isolated species (and bogus "races") each on a war against all, symbiosis seems to be yet evolving at the extreme cellular level. Here is the abstract about this alternative respiratory symbiont that differs from the nearly ubiquitous mitochondria.
The endosymbiont Candidatus Azoamicus ciliaticola was proposed to generate ATP for its eukaryotic host, an anaerobic ciliate of the Plagiopylea class, fulfilling a function analogous to mitochondria in other eukaryotic cells. The discovery of this respiratory endosymbiosis has major implications for both evolutionary history and ecology of microbial eukaryotes. However, with only a single species described, knowledge of its environmental distribution and diversity is limited. Here we report four complete, circular metagenome assembled genomes (cMAGs) representing respiratory endosymbionts inhabiting groundwater in California, Ohio, and Germany. These cMAGs form two lineages comprising a monophyletic clade within the uncharacterized gammaproteobacterial order UBA6186, enabling evolutionary analysis of their key protein complexes. Strikingly, all four cMAGs encode a cytochrome cbb3 oxidase, which indicates that these endosymbionts have the capacity for aerobic respiration. Accordingly, we detect these respiratory endosymbionts in diverse habitats worldwide, thus further expanding the ecological scope of this respiratory symbiosis.
My first impression is that this is indicative of ongoing cosmic evolutionary anomalies on par with the discovery of transcendental numbers. Both are analogues of the transfinite ordering of the power of infinite possibilities for forward problem solving cooperative biophysical evolution. Thus Leibniz dictum in his Monadology that we as finite beings cannot grasp the full scope of such infinite potential due to our necessarily limited yet progressively developing vision. I leave it to the reader of this blog to unpack the implications.
Detection of the Azoamicaceae 16S rRNA gene sequences in publicly available 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing datasets shows a global distribution across all continents. Points represent amplicon datasets, and are colored according to their affiliation with the Azoamicaceae genome that have > 95% 16S rRNA gene identity to reads in the dataset. The hotspots in the global north likely reflect sampling bias.
