{"id":201091,"date":"2024-12-09T18:13:48","date_gmt":"2024-12-10T00:13:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/scientists-discover-more-mitochondria-like-symbionts-with-surprising-metabolic-capacities"},"modified":"2024-12-09T18:13:48","modified_gmt":"2024-12-10T00:13:48","slug":"scientists-discover-more-mitochondria-like-symbionts-with-surprising-metabolic-capacities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/scientists-discover-more-mitochondria-like-symbionts-with-surprising-metabolic-capacities","title":{"rendered":"Scientists discover more mitochondria-like symbionts with surprising metabolic capacities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-discover-more-mitochondria-like-symbionts-with-surprising-metabolic-capacities3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 2021, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported an astonishing new form of symbiosis: They found a unique bacterium that lives inside a ciliate\u2014a unicellular eukaryote\u2014and provides it with energy. The symbiont\u2019s role is thus strongly reminiscent of mitochondria, with the key difference that the endosymbiont derives energy from the respiration of nitrate, not oxygen.<\/p>\n<p>Now the researchers from Bremen set out to learn more about the environmental distribution and diversity of these peculiar symbionts. \u201cAfter our initial discovery of this <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/symbiont\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">symbiont<\/a> in a freshwater lake, we wondered how common these organisms are in nature,\u201d says Jana Milucka from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology. \u201cAre they extremely rare and therefore eluded detection so long? Or do they exist elsewhere and if so, what are their metabolic capacities?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2021, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported an astonishing new form of symbiosis: They found a unique bacterium that lives inside a ciliate\u2014a unicellular eukaryote\u2014and provides it with energy. The symbiont\u2019s role is thus strongly reminiscent of mitochondria, with the key difference that the endosymbiont derives energy [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}