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Mixotricha paradoxa, a microscopic organism made up of hundreds of thousands of smaller life-forms, lives inside the gut of a termite. M. paradoxa is an extreme example of how all plants and animals, including ourselves, have evolved to accommodate a large number of people. Article evaluation

The commotion surrounding the mapping of the human genome—the sum of all the genes in an individual—might lead one to believe that each species has only one genome and that the genetic makeup of individual organisms is discrete and unitary. This is not the case. We multicellular beings, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, contain multitudes. Every cell in an animal has at least two interacting genomes. The first is the DNA in the cell nucleus; this is the genome that was recently “mapped.” The other is the DNA in the mitochondria, which are the cell’s multiple oxygen-breathing organelles that can only be inherited through the maternal line. Some scientists have known for more than a century that every organism is a multiple being, but until recently, these unconventional researchers were ignored.

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The genomes that determine limbs, eyes, and nervous systems, for example, are very similar to our own in most of the animals we think we know best (mammals, reptiles, insects). These animals, like us, have two genomes. Even unicellular organisms with no eyes, limbs, or nervous systems, such as amoebas and paramecia, have nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. Plants and algae have these double genomes, as well as a third symbiotic genome. They ingested (but did not digest) photosynthetic blue-green bacteria during their evolutionary history. As a result, every visible photosynthetic organism has at least three genomes. However, many organisms, such as the protists that live inside termites, have five or more genomes.

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The great nineteenth-century naturalist Joseph Leidy, one of the founders of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, was the first to examine the contents of a termite’s gut in detail. “I have often wondered as to why,” he wrote, “in watching the Termites from time to time wandering along their passages beneath stones.”

what the exact nature of their food might be.” What he saw through his microscope astounded him. If the experimenter ruptures the termite’s intestine, “myriads of the living occupants escape, reminding one of the turning out of a multitude of persons from the door of a crowded meeting-house,” he wrote. Leidy quickly realized that what he thought were “white ants” were actually dozens of different kinds of tiny life-forms, such as bacteria and what we now call protists. (Protists are nucleated microbes that are more complex than bacteria and include amoebas, slime molds, and algae.) We now understand that the massive and motley crew observed by Leidy within a termite is not a foregone conclusion or a pathological infection. Rather, it is an essential component of the termite’s digestive system, organized as a specific tissue: an aggregate working mechanism that converts the refractory compounds lignin and cellulose (the main constituents of wood) into food. For probably 100 million years, this composite fabric, or living consortium, has evolved in the nearly oxygen-free closed system of the termite’s abdomen; without the living, wood-degrading factories that have become their digestive systems, these termites starve.

Konstantin S. Merezhkovsky, a pioneering biologist, proposed in 1909 that the little green dots (chloroplasts) in plant cells that synthesize sugars in the presence of sunlight evolved from foreign symbionts. He proposed that “symbiogenesis,” a term he coined to describe the merging of different kinds of life-forms into new species, was a major creative force in the production of new kinds of organisms. During the early decades of the twentieth century, a Russian anatomist, Andrey S. Famintsyn, and an American biologist, Ivan E. Wallin, worked independently on similar hypotheses. Wallin expanded on his unconventional view that all types of symbioses were important in evolution, and Famintsyn, believing that chloroplasts were symbionts, succeeded in keeping them outside the cell. Both men studied the physiology of chloroplasts and bacteria and discovered striking similarities in structure and function. They proposed that chloroplasts entered cells as live food—fighting microbes—and were then exploited by their ingestors. They remained within the larger cells throughout the ages, safe and ready to reproduce. Famintsyn died in 1918, and Wallin and Merezhkovsky were shunned by their peers, and their work was forgotten. However, recent research has shown that the cell’s most important organelles—chloroplasts in plants and mitochondria in plants and animals—are highly integrated and well-organized former bacteria. Scientists were able to raise and resolve the question of how these bacteria became permanent symbionts using new methods.

We, like other animals, have a variety of specific microbes in our intestines that help us digest food, though some are able to live outside of humans. Few of our microbes are organized as tissue layers.

as they are in termites Nonetheless, without these hitchhikers to aid in fiber digestion and vitamin production, we, like termites, become weak and even die. The mitochondria in our nucleated cells, on the other hand, are completely essential to our bodies. These microscopic organisms use oxygen to generate the chemical energy required to sustain life. They reproduce independently of nuclear DNA and multiply faster after short bursts of muscular exercise, resulting in stronger, more mitochondria-packed muscles. No one has yet succeeded in growing mitochondria in test tubes because they are so genetically integrated into each of our cells.

Important information for writing discussion questions and participation

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Please read through the following information on writing a Discussion question response and participation posts.

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Important information on Writing a Discussion Question

• Your response needs to be a minimum of 150 words (not including your list of references)
• There needs to be at least TWO references with ONE being a peer reviewed professional journal article.
• Include in-text citations in your response
• Do not include quotes—instead summarize and paraphrase the information
• Follow APA-7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed

Participation –replies to your classmates or instructor

• A minimum of 6 responses per week, on at least 3 days of the week.
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• Each response needs to be at least 75 words in length (does not include your list of references)
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• Follow APA 7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed

• Remember to use and follow APA-7th edition for all weekly assignments, discussion questions, and participation points.
• Here are some helpful links
• The is a great resource

We believe that Wallin and Merezhkovsky were fundamentally correct when they stated that all nucleated living things evolved through symbiogenesis, owing to preexisting bacterial genomes that were physically associated with other organisms. Reef-building corals, for example, are now known to have five distinct genomes from previously independent organisms. Mixotricha paradoxa, a compound beauty found in termite guts, has five genomes as well. Indeed, M. paradoxa has the potential to be the “poster animal” for symbiogenesis.

J.L. Sutherland, an Australian biologist, first described and named “the paradoxical being with mixed-up hairs” in 1933. (she mistakenly thought it was the only microbe that swims by simultaneously using both flagella and cilia). In the 1950s, studies using the electron microscope by A.V. Grimstone of Cambridge and the late L.R. Cleveland of Harvard revealed that M. paradoxa was a hundred times larger than its close relatives, contained four different types of bacteria, and lacked mitochondria.

We have studied and photographed this organism for many years. M. paradoxa appears to be a single-celled swimming ciliate under low magnification. The electron microscope, on the other hand, reveals five distinct types of creatures. Externally, it appears to be the type of one-celled organism known as a protist. Many spherical bacteria are found inside each nucleated cell, where one would expect to find mitochondria. There are 250,000 hairlike Treponema spirochetes (similar to the type that causes syphilis) on the surface, as well as a 250,000-strong contingent of large rod bacteria. In addition, we redescribed 200 larger spirochetes and named them Canaleparolina darwiniensis.

Acceptance of individuals’ composite nature, we predict, will soon revolutionize evolutionary biology. Bacteria are master genetic engineers, with excellent splicers, dicers, and genome mergers. Bacteria are supremely promiscuous beings, devoid of immune systems and always reproducing without mate recognition, in which infection and sex—that is, gene flow—are virtually the same thing. Bacterial sexual proclivities include (when their survival is threatened) rampant gene exchange, which makes our own species’ most bacchanalian orgies appear rather subdued.

Biologists have long wondered why there are so many different kinds of beetles. Nature’s beetlemania could be explained by symbionts beneath the surface that generate variety at the genomic level. Insects have a remarkable ability to integrate bacterial genomes. Bacteria can live in all tissues, accumulate in eggs, and be inherited in many cases. Beetles have formed alliances with a wide range of bacteria; many more types live inside their tissues than in the tissues of most other animal groups.

We may eventually realize that natural selection operates not so much on random mutations, which are often harmful, but on new types of individuals that emerge through symbiogenesis. Examining any organism at the microscopic level is like getting closer to a Georges Seurat pointillist painting: the seemingly solid figures of humans, dogs, and trees reveal themselves to be made up of innumerable tiny dots and dashes, each with its own color, density, and form.

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