- A-Z
- Endocytobiosis and ...
- Volume 23 (2012) - ...
- Evolutionary signif...
- Autor(in)
- Seitenbereich
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064-068
- Schlagwort(e)
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Hydrogenosomes, mitosomes, Trichomonas, Euglena, mitochondria, physiology
- Zusammenfsg.
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Endosymbiotic theory is traditionally founded in comparative physiology and biochemistry. That is also where it works best. Mereschkowsky’s first formulation of the endosymbiotic origin of plastids was based on the comparison of physiological attributes of plastids and cyanobacteria (Mereschkowsky 1905). The revival of endosymbiotic theory for the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts by the late Lynn Margulis (Sagan 1967; Margulis 1970) was also very much based on comparative physiology, although her suggestion for an additional endosymbiont for the origin of flagella from spirochaetes was based on morphological similarity. When hydrogenosomes were discovered by Müller in 1973 (Lindmark and Müller 1973), they looked much more like clostridia than mitochondria from the standpoint of comparative biochemistry, but that is mainly because in 1973 the concept of mitochondria was built around investigations on rat liver mitochondria, a strictly aerobically functioning organelle, and in addition very little was known about the mitochondria of anaerobic eukaryotes. As advances have accrued in the understanding of mitochondria of anaerobic eukaryotes, the smaller have become the biochemical differences between mitochondria and hydrogenosomes (Müller et al. 2012). Today it is clear that they share a common ancestry and that they represent related biochemical manifestations of one and the same endosymbiotically derived organelle.