This is exactly right. The alga has one more organelle that originated as a bacterial symbiont, just like mitochondria and chloroplasts, which is super cool! The alga, Braarudosphaera bigelowii, is a coccolithophore, which is very cool by itself. They are important part of the carbon cycle. And they look supercool - they are covered in calcareous scales and this species is shaped like a dodecahedron!!! …wikimedia.org/…/Braarudosphaera_bigelowii.jpg
Thanks! It's better than anything I came up with. Also saw this: Share your PDF as a Link (https://pdfdeck.com/), which may or may not work. I would think one could put the PDF on NextCloud (or similar), and then share a link from there to a comment here.
Man, assuming I understand this properly, if they had more time to evolve and adapt this on masse we could see some improvements to the marine ecosystem!
Not in the paper data at least. It does have plastids which I had to look up (been a while since gen bio). Plastids are similar to chloroplasts. So triple endosymbiont actually. Again if data holds to further scrutiny.
I think plastid is the generic term for that organelle family and chloroplasts are plastids specialized for photosynthesis.
So they probably don’t want to state the plastids have a function they havent confirmed or something like that
You are correct about the definitions but I’d imagine chloroplasts have some relatively standard assays which would have been tried, though this isn’t really my area of expertise.
UCYN-A (Candidatus Atelocyanobacterium thalassa) is a cyanobacterial symbiont of the unicellular algae Braarudosphaera bigelowii. And yes, it makes N2 into NH3, making that nitrogen fixed and available for B. bigelowii
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