The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized • Hacker News Board

Re: The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized

#11

Post by chasil » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 10:56 AM UTC

"At some point, in a sequel to mitochondrial capture, a eukaryote engulfed a cyanobacterium capable of photosynthesis... green organelles called chloroplasts, evolved into plants and other photosynthesizers."

Chloroplasts are only one type of plastid; this process occurred far more than once.

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

Re: The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized

#12

Post by nkrisc » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 11:01 AM UTC

So did multi-celled life evolve several times independently among the original eukaryotes if some gained chloroplasts or mitochondria before being multi-cellular?

Re: The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized

#13

Post by dexwiz » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 1:50 PM UTC

janpmz wrote: post #8

Yesterday an article was trending "The Secret Electrostatic World of Insects". Now I wonder, how much does static electricity actually affect cells? https://www.wired.com/story/the-secret-electrostatic-world-o...

Cells are predominately electrical in nature. Our sense of physical being is an emergent effect of electromagnetic repulsion at the atomic level. The smaller you get, the less sense it makes to model things as solid and the more sense to model things as charge fields. Modeling proteins and molecules is largely about modeling their electric field.

Quantum mechanics get outsized attention as the “small scale” world. The electrical exists just above it in size, but is much more relevant to how we perceive reality.

Re: The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized

#14

Post by gus_massa » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #12

So did multi-celled life evolve several times independently among the original eukaryotes if some gained chloroplasts or mitochondria before being multi-cellular?

First we gained mithocondria and later we split in several branches.

Some of the branches gained chloroplast. (IIRC there are three versions.)

And some members of the branches got multicelular.

A more technical and accurate version from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism

> However, complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: animals, symbiomycotan fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants. It evolved repeatedly for Chloroplastida (green algae and land plants), once for animals, once for brown algae, three times in the fungi (chytrids, ascomycetes, and basidiomycetes) and perhaps several times for slime molds and red algae.

Re: The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized

#15

Post by hanjeanwat » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 7:23 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #12

So did multi-celled life evolve several times independently among the original eukaryotes if some gained chloroplasts or mitochondria before being multi-cellular?

Yes! It evolved at least 25 times (that we know of). Animals, plants, algae, fungi, etc. all invented multicellularity independently and in many of those groups did so multiple times.

Re: The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized

#16

Post by cbluth » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:04 AM UTC

thangalin wrote: post #7

A brief synopsis of eukaryotic life from my book, showing where complex life fits into our timeline: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=12

Wow, good one, I loved the illustrations too. What a portentous, foreboding prediction of humanity