ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Origins of eukaryotic excitability.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 99 citations in OpenAlex.
- Embodied behavioural complexity in a ciliated microorganism.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A light-off response characterised by body contraction and ciliary arrest in Acropora coral larvae.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Spark or Sound: How Two Differing Explanatory Strategies Impact the Debate on the Physical Nature of Neuronal Excitability.Membranes · 2026Article
- Unraveling the colonization process of microeukaryotic communities on artificial micro-ecological islands.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- Geometrical preference of anchoring sites in the unicellular organismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- The photophobic response in the apusomonad Podomonas kaiyoae is mediated by coordination of cilia and actin filaments.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Voltage-gated ion channel diversity underlies neuronal excitability and nervous system evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Perspective on Interdisciplinary Approaches on Chemotaxis.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Review
- Variation in Social Feeding Behaviors and Interactions AmongEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- A diverse Palaeoproterozoic microbial ecosystem implies early eukaryogenesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Persistent pseudopod splitting is an effective chemotaxis strategy in shallow gradients.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Electrical signaling and coordinated behavior in the closest relative of animals.Science advances · 2025Article
- Dynamics of neural activity in early nervous system evolution.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2024Article
- Phytophthora zoospores display klinokinetic behaviour in response to a chemoattractant.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- The evolution of multicellularity and cell differentiation symposium: bridging evolutionary cell biology and computational modelling using emerging model systems.Biology open · 2024Review
- Learning optimal integration of spatial and temporal information in noisy chemotaxis.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Methods and Measures for Investigating Microscale Motility.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Review
- Perspectives on Principles of Cellular Behavior from the Biophysics of Protists.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
All living cells interact dynamically with a constantly changing world. Eukaryotes, in particular, evolved radically new ways to sense and react to their environment. These advances enabled new and more complex forms of cellular behaviour in eukaryotes, including directional movement, active feeding, mating, and responses to predation. But what are the key events and innovations during eukaryogenesis that made all of this possible? Here we describe the ancestral repertoire of eukaryotic excitability and discuss five major cellular innovations that enabled its evolutionary origin. The innovations include a vastly expanded repertoire of ion channels, the emergence of cilia and pseudopodia, endomembranes as intracellular capacitors, a flexible plasma membrane and the relocation of chemiosmotic ATP synthesis to mitochondria, which liberated the plasma membrane for more complex electrical signalling involved in sensing and reacting. We conjecture that together with an increase in cell size, these new forms of excitability greatly amplified the degrees of freedom associated with cellular responses, allowing eukaryotes to vastly outperform prokaryotes in terms of both speed and accuracy. This comprehensive new perspective on the evolution of excitability enriches our view of eukaryogenesis and emphasizes behaviour and sensing as major contributors to the success of eukaryotes. This article is part of the theme issue 'Basal cognition: conceptual tools and the view from the single cell'.
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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.