• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Chicken Or The Egg? We Might Need To Change The Question

November 9, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

What came first, the chicken or the egg? If we’re talking about eggs in general, then the latter, but a new study of an ancient single-celled organism suggests the genetic tools to “create” eggs may have been about before animals were even a thing.

The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Geneva, focused on pinpointing the evolutionary origins of embryogenesis, the process of development that sees a single-celled fertilized egg (zygote) turn into an embryo made up of multiple cells. 

Advertisement

The first step in this process is called cleavage, where the zygote undergoes cell division, but doesn’t grow. This stage, and the other key elements of embryogenesis, are features that have remained well-conserved throughout animal evolution.

Despite this, scientists know little about how embryogenesis came to be. Life on Earth started out unicellular – so how did we end up with a process that transforms a single cell into a multicellular animal?

The team looked to a recently discovered, distant relative of ours: Chromosphaera perkinsii, a unicellular protist that, over a billion years ago, branched off from the evolutionary path leading to animals.

In the lab, the researchers observed the development of C. perkinsii in real-time, using a technique called long-term brightfield live imaging. From this, they discovered that, much like the cleavage stage of animal embryogenesis, C. perkinsii cells grow for around 65 hours, before dividing into a multicellular colony without growing anymore.

Advertisement

The team also looked deeper into the kinds of genes that were being expressed, and the biomolecules produced as a result, during this stage. Again, they found similarities to animal embryogenesis – and even a molecular toolkit with a resemblance to that seen in the maturation of animal eggs.

“[B]efore the first division, C. perkinsii produces and accumulates key cellular components such as proteins and lipids in a manner reminiscent of oocyte maturation,” the team writes in the study.

‘‘Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behaviour shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth,” said Omaya Dudin, who led the study, in a statement.

What the study’s findings mean for the evolution of embryogenesis, and cleavage in particular, is up for debate – does the process seen in C. perkinsii share an evolutionary pathway with that seen in animals, or did similar things just so happen to evolve independently of each other?

Advertisement

Regardless, “It’s fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years,” concluded first author Marine Olivetta.

The study is published in Nature.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Canadian PM Trudeau not sorry for snapping at protester who insulted his wife
  2. Australian regulator aims to rein in Google’s advertising power
  3. White House blocks Trump attempt to withhold documents related to Jan 6 attack
  4. Everyone’s Having A Field Day With ChatGPT – But Nobody Knows How It Actually Works

Source Link: The Chicken Or The Egg? We Might Need To Change The Question

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Gonorrhea Vaccines, New Antibiotics, And At-Home Testing: What’s The Latest In STI Research?
  • What NASA’s Galileo Spacecraft Saw As It Plunged Into Jupiter
  • Very Hungry “Plastivore” Caterpillars Get Fat From Eating Plastic
  • “Nobody Expected This”: Earth’s Rotation Will Speed Up Tomorrow, Bucking The Downward Trend
  • Chimps Are Sticking Grass In Their Ears And Rears As They Embrace “Pointless” Fad
  • Hui Te Rangiora: Old Māori Legend Suggests They May Have Discovered Antarctica 1,000 Years Before Europeans
  • “Potential Impact On Saturn”: Astronomers Appeal For Help As Video Appears To Show Object Hitting The Gas Giant
  • What Is Prosopometamorphopsia? The “Exceedingly Rare” Condition That Made A Patient See Faces As Dragons
  • Are We In An Enormous Void? It Could Explain What’s Wrong With Our Model Of The Universe
  • Woylies Boing Back Into Western Australia Thanks To Groundbreaking Wildlife Project
  • North America’s Oldest Pterosaur And Turtle Fossils Found In Arizona’s Petrified Forest
  • Proposed “Dark Dwarfs” Near The Galactic Center Could Reveal The Nature Of Dark Matter
  • Watch: 18-Kilometer-High Ash Cloud Looms Over Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki After “Explosive” Eruption
  • “ShipGoo001”: Mystery Of Entirely New Lifeform Discovered Coating A Great Lakes Ship
  • Rare White Humpback Whale Calf Filmed By Drone Off Australia’s East Coast
  • Who Was Buried At Cave Of Salome: A Female Disciple, Jesus’ Midwife, Or A Princess?
  • “Hidden” Changes To US Health Data Swapping “Gender” For “Sex” Spark Fears For Public Trust
  • Easter Island Was Never As Isolated As We Thought – Study Puts That “Strange Argument” To Bed
  • If Birds Are Dinosaurs, Why Are None As Big As T. Rexes?
  • Psychologists Demonstrate Illusion That Could Be Screwing Up Our Perception Of Time
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version