ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2000
The chimeric eukaryote: origin of the nucleus from the karyomastigont in amitochondriate protists.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2000. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 228 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mechanisms and Therapeutic Potential of Targeting Mitophagy in Neurodegenerative Diseases.Molecular neurobiology · 2026Review
- Pan-microalgal dark proteome mapping via interpretable deep learning and synthetic chimeras.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Nrf1 acts as a highly-conserved determinon for maintaining robust redox homeostasis in the eco-evo-devo process of life histories.Cell stress · 2025Review
- Evidence for evolutionary relationship between archaeplastidal and cyanobacterial phytochromes based on their chromophore pockets.Photochemical & photobiological sciences : Official journal of the European Photochemistry Association and the European Society for Photobiology · 2022Article
- Gene Duplications Trace Mitochondria to the Onset of Eukaryote Complexity.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Biomolecular Basis of Cellular Consciousness via Subcellular Nanobrains.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- ROS and Oxidative Response Systems in Plants Under Biotic and Abiotic Stresses: Revisiting the Crucial Role of Phosphite Triggered Plants Defense Response.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Review
- Building genomes to understand biology.Nature communications · 2020Review
- The Syntrophy hypothesis for the origin of eukaryotes revisited.Nature microbiology · 2020Review
- Descent of Bacteria and Eukarya From an Archaeal Root of Life.Evolutionary bioinformatics online · 2020Article
- Energide-cell body as smallest unit of eukaryotic life.Annals of botany · 2018Article
- Cell polarity: having and making sense of direction-on the evolutionary significance of the primary cilium/centrosome organ in Metazoa.Open biology · 2018Review
- Ribosome Incorporation into Somatic Cells Promotes Lineage Transdifferentiation towards Multipotency.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Symbiosis in eukaryotic evolution.Journal of theoretical biology · 2017Article
- The Physiology of Phagocytosis in the Context of Mitochondrial Origin.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2017Review
- The multiple evolutionary origins of the eukaryotic N-glycosylation pathway.Biology direct · 2016Article
- Cognition, Information Fields and Hologenomic Entanglement: Evolution in Light and Shadow.Biology · 2016Article
- Review
- Origin of eukaryotes from within archaea, archaeal eukaryome and bursts of gene gain: eukaryogenesis just made easier?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Review
- Endosymbiotic theories for eukaryote origin.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We present a testable model for the origin of the nucleus, the membrane-bounded organelle that defines eukaryotes. A chimeric cell evolved via symbiogenesis by syntrophic merger between an archaebacterium and a eubacterium. The archaebacterium, a thermoacidophil resembling extant Thermoplasma, generated hydrogen sulfide to protect the eubacterium, a heterotrophic swimmer comparable to Spirochaeta or Hollandina that oxidized sulfide to sulfur. Selection pressure for speed swimming and oxygen avoidance led to an ancient analogue of the extant cosmopolitan bacterial consortium "Thiodendron latens." By eubacterial-archaebacterial genetic integration, the chimera, an amitochondriate heterotroph, evolved. This "earliest branching protist" that formed by permanent DNA recombination generated the nucleus as a component of the karyomastigont, an intracellular complex that assured genetic continuity of the former symbionts. The karyomastigont organellar system, common in extant amitochondriate protists as well as in presumed mitochondriate ancestors, minimally consists of a single nucleus, a single kinetosome and their protein connector. As predecessor of standard mitosis, the karyomastigont preceded free (unattached) nuclei. The nucleus evolved in karyomastigont ancestors by detachment at least five times (archamoebae, calonymphids, chlorophyte green algae, ciliates, foraminifera). This specific model of syntrophic chimeric fusion can be proved by sequence comparison of functional domains of motility proteins isolated from candidate taxa.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.