ArticlePloS one2009
The emergence of predators in early life: there was no Garden of Eden.
Article in PloS one, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Last Universal Common Ancestor of Ribosome-Encoding Organisms: Portrait of LUCA.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Review
- The Evolutionary Transition of the RNA World to Obcells to Cellular-Based Life.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Division of labour in a matrix, rather than phagocytosis or endosymbiosis, as a route for the origin of eukaryotic cells.Biology direct · 2020Article
- Cell Death in Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality.The Yale journal of biology and medicine · 2019Review
- Molecular ontogeny of the stomach in the catshark Scyliorhinus canicula.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Chemotactic network responses to live bacteria show independence of phagocytosis from chemoreceptor sensing.eLife · 2017Article
- The relative ages of eukaryotes and akaryotes.Journal of molecular evolution · 2014Article
- Primal eukaryogenesis: on the communal nature of precellular States, ancestral to modern life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2012Article
- Darwin's goldmine is still open: variation and selection run the world.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2012Review
- The falsifiability of the models for the origin of eukaryotes.Current genetics · 2011Review
- An overview of the introns-first theory.Journal of molecular evolution · 2009Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundEukaryote cells are suggested to arise somewhere between 0.85~2.7 billion years ago. However, in the present world of unicellular organisms, cells that derive their food and metabolic energy from larger cells engulfing smaller cells (phagocytosis) are almost exclusively eukaryotic. Combining these propositions, that eukaryotes were the first phagocytotic predators and that they arose only 0.85~2.7 billion years ago, leads to an unexpected prediction of a long period (approximately 1-3 billion years) with no phagocytotes -- a veritable Garden of Eden. METHODOLOGY: We test whether such a long period is reasonable by simulating a population of very simple unicellular organisms -- given only basic physical, biological and ecological principles. Under a wide range of initial conditions, cellular specialization occurs early in evolution; we find a range of cell types from small specialized primary producers to larger opportunistic or specialized predators.
conclusionsBoth strategies, specialized smaller cells and phagocytotic larger cells are apparently fundamental biological strategies that are expected to arise early in cellular evolution. Such early predators could have been 'prokaryotes', but if the earliest cells on the eukaryote lineage were predators then this explains most of their characteristic features.
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