Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Cotton JA
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2951413 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Cotton James A JA McInerney James O JO
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20100917 40
The traditional tree of life shows eukaryotes as a distinct lineage of living things, but many studies have suggested that the first eukaryotic cells were chimeric, descended from both Eubacteria (through the mitochondrion) and Archaebacteria. Eukaryote nuclei thus contain genes of both eubacterial and archaebacterial origins, and these genes have different functions within eukaryotic cells. Here we report that archaebacterium-derived genes are significantly more likely to be essential to yeast ...[more]