Quotes About Eukaryotic

The cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic bacteria tinted blue-green by chlorophyll and other pigments, harvest sunlight and fix CO2 much like eukaryotic algae and land plants. However, when hydrogen sulfide (H2S, well known for its "rotten egg" smell) is present, many cyanobacteria use this gas rather than water to supply the electrons needed for photosynthesis. Sulfur and sulfate are formed as by-products, but oxygen is not.

As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

According to biologist Lynn Margulis, it was this collaborative approach which allowed life to survive the first toxic pollutant holocaust—the spread in the atmosphere of a gas lethal to earth's horde of early inhabitants. The killer gas was oxygen. But mitochondria living in the new eukaryotic cells saved the day, gulping oxygen before it could do its harm and turning the murderous vapor into food for their protectress and for the other members of her cellular commune.

There are over 7,000 different types of proteins in typical eukaryotic cells; the total number depends on the cell class and function.

The average human comprises forty trillion eukaryotic cells and an accompanying microbiome of a hundred trillion bacteria, mostly in the gut, and one quadrillion viruses. We are, in raw cell numbers, more microbe than mammal.

It seems that all eukaryotic cells either have, or once had (and then lost) mitochondria. In other words, possession of mitochondria is a sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition

This was difficult to prove as most hydrogenosomes have lost their entire genome, but it is now established with some certainty.1 In other words, whatever bacteria entered into a symbiotic relationship in the first eukaryotic cell, its descendents numbered among them both mitochondria and hydrogenosomes.