Post 10: We are Asgardians ⚒️
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What if we are all actually Asgardians? 🤔
To find evolutionary relationships between species, we use genes rich in information. Then, we search for these genes in many species and reconstruct their evolutionary relationships with “phylogenies.” However, any phylogeny will always be incomplete, as in addition to extinct species, we find more species and genes every year, and our algorithms improve.
Thijs’ team has been studying the phylogenies of a group of microbes called “Asgardian archaea” for several years, which are currently our closest relatives in the unicellular world. Recently, this team reconstructed more genomes of Asgardian archaea, which allowed them to create more complete phylogenies. The result was that we as eukaryotes group within the Asgardian archaea, specifically with the order Hodarchaeales, which shares with us many genes related to information processing and signaling, cytoskeleton, cellular trafficking, and maintenance mechanisms (homeostasis). This implies that we as eukaryotes are actually an order within the group of Asgardian archaea 😬 … So, if we are archaea, we are some very handsome archaea.
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