by Christoph — Having 1 or 2 'Asgard' archaea under the microscope – after having cultivated them with great effort and even more patience – and looking them in the face is exciting, but a bit unsatisfying when they are cousins. Are they mavericks or rather typical for "Lokis"? Here are the portraits of two more distant relatives, both also cousins: Margulisarchaeum peptidophila HC1 and Flexarchaeum multiprotrusionis SC1.
by Christoph — There was joy, even excitement among archaeologists when the first images of P. syntrophicum MK‑D1 made the rounds. This sense of joy deepend still when images of its cousin Lokiarchaeon ossiferum Loki-B35 were added a little later. The ancestors suddenly got their own faces, literally, and were no longer only vaguely recognizable from genome sequences!
by Janie — For a very long time, symbiogenesis was scoffed at as a fringe science. This mindset plagued the field from the get-go in the 1880s, when the botanist Andreas Franz Wilhem Schimper first put forth the idea that eukaryotic organelles might be bacterial, to the turn of the century, which saw the first key paper on symbiogenesis...
