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    Home > Biochemistry News > Microbiology News > Nature: The dream linkage between Thor and Wukong. Li Meng of Shenzhen University named these Asgard archaea as Wukong

    Nature: The dream linkage between Thor and Wukong. Li Meng of Shenzhen University named these Asgard archaea as Wukong

    • Last Update: 2021-05-23
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    Written | Edited by Wang Cong | Nagashi Typesetting | Shui Chengwen In recent years, Marvel superhero movies have become popular all over the world.
    I believe many people have fantasized about whether Monkey King can be compared with Thor and beat Thanos in the Marvel universe.
    In fact, Marvel really has a superhero based on Monkey King, Monkey King, who debuted in the fifth issue of "Iron Man 2.
    0" (July 2011).

    And just at the beginning of this month, Marvel announced that it would put Monkey King on the big screen and shoot the live-action movie Monkey King.

    One is the god of thunder in Norse mythology, and the other is the monkey king in Chinese mythology.
    We did not expect that before we saw the two in the same frame on the big screen, now we see their dream linkage in the Nature paper.

    On April 28, 2021, the team of Professor Li Meng from the Institute for Advanced Study of Shenzhen University and the Eugene Koonin team of the National Institutes of Health published a study titled: Expanded diversity of Asgard archaea and their relationships with eukaryotes in the top international academic journal Nature paper.

    The research team conducted a comparative analysis of 162 complete or almost complete genomes of Asgard archaea, including 75 previously unreported genomes assembled by metagenomics, greatly expanding the phylogeny of Asgard archaea Diversity.

    Based on these analyses, the research team increased the Asgard archaea from the original 6 phyla to 12 phyla, and named one of the phylum Wukong archaeota (Wukongarchaeota).

    Let the ancient Chinese mythology and the Nordic mythology have a linkage.

    Before Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope, people once thought that there were only two types of organisms: plants and animals.

    As Leeuwenhoek observed microbes with a microscope, the door to a new world was opened.
    It turned out that our living environment is full of countless microbes that are invisible to the naked eye.

    With the advancement of microscopy technology, people have observed more and more bacteria.
    At this time, biologists divided cell life into two categories: eukaryotes (the nucleus and organelles with membrane structure) and prokaryotes (no Nucleus and membrane structure organelles).

    At this time bacteria were the only prokaryotes known to people.

    In the 1970s, scientists discovered a new type of life form-archaea.

    Archaea are unicellular microorganisms.
    They do not have a nucleus or any other membrane-bound organelles.
    Although they resemble bacteria in shape, studies based on molecular biology have shown that archaea are closer to eukaryotes in evolution, and archaea should belong to A whole new form of life.

    Based on these findings, the three-domain system was proposed by Carl Woese in 1977, and in 1990, a new classification of cell life forms—the three-domain system was revised.

    This system divides cell life into three categories: Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya.

    The system believes that the tree of life split into three main trunks (domains) long ago.

    One tree represents modern bacteria; the other represents archaea, and the third represents eukaryotes.

    Three-domain system, dual-domain system, but the “three-domain system” has always been controversial.
    In the 1980s, UCLA evolutionary biologist James Lake proposed that eukaryotes are sisters of archaea.
    This idea evolved.
    Become a "dual domain system".

    The dual-domain system believes that eukaryotes evolved from the branches of archaea.
    Today, the scientific community has recognized that nuclear organisms originated from "endosymbiosis.
    " The endosymbiosis theory believes that a simple host cell swallows a bacterium, and the two are established.
    As a result of a mutually beneficial relationship, the bacteria that were eventually swallowed evolved into energy-producing mitochondria, forming what is now known as eukaryotes.

    However, the proponents of the three-domain system and the proponents of the two-domain system have a serious disagreement on the nature of phagocytes.

    Proponents of the three-domain system believe that phagocytes are primitive eukaryotes, neither modern archaea nor modern eukaryotes.

    Proponents of the dual-domain system believe that phagocytes are an archaea, so eukaryotes are all branches of this archaea.

    Although there is controversy, the three-domain system dominates.

    In recent years, advances in gene sequencing and analysis technology have led to a rapid increase in the number of classifications of archaea, and this has also caused the dispute between the three-domain system and the two-domain system to rise again.

    Evolutionary biologists used the latest powerful modeling techniques to create a phylogenetic tree forest, detailing the relationship between archaea families.

    In many cases, the analysis results place eukaryotes in the archaeal domain.

    However, many scientists believe that these conclusions still lack sufficient data to support.

    Discovery of Asgard Archaea In 2015, the evolutionary microbiologist Thijs Ettema of Uppsala University in Sweden published a paper in the journal Nature.
    They discovered and analyzed a new type of archaea-Rocky Archaea ( Lokiarchaeota) DNA sequence.

    After that, a number of new archaea related to Rocky Archaea were discovered one after another, named Thorarchaeota, Odinarchaeota, Heimdallarchaeota, and Heimdallarchaeota.
    Bacteria (Helarchaeota), Gerdarchaeota (Gerdarchaeota).

    Scientists named these newly discovered archaeal phylums after the god Asgard in Norse mythology.

    The controversy will continue.
    The size of Asgard archaea is small, but the facts have proved that their ability is not small.
    Their appearance has rekindled the debate about the true number of life domains and the origin of eukaryotic life.

    Asgard archaea contain genes similar to eukaryotes.
    For example, Rocky Archaea has been found to have the iconic protein actin of eukaryotes.
    Through in-depth analysis of their DNA, it has been shown that all modern eukaryotes The organisms come from the same archaeal flora. If this is the case, basically all complex life, from green algae to giant blue whales, originally came from archaea.

    The research by Li Meng’s team cannot really clarify the evolutionary relationship between eukaryotes and Asgard archaea, but this research greatly expands the phylogenetic diversity of Asgard archaea and reveals Asgard archaea possess more eukaryotic biomarker proteins than other archaea.

    It is suggested that the ancestors of eukaryotes may accumulate more eukaryotic components than known Asgard archaea, and finally produced eukaryotic-like cells (maybe produced by symbiosis with one or more bacteria of).

    Note: This article discusses the classification of cell life.
    Viruses have no cell structure and are beyond the scope of this article.

    The picture of the title is from the movie "The Return of the Great Sage".
    The link to the paper: is open to reprint this article is open to reprint: just leave a message in this article and let me know 
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