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Medical News
The microbe was collected from deep sea sedimentsTHE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES
A single-celled organism found off the coast of Japan could offer us a glimpse of one of our most distant ancestors. The microbe may explain one of the great mysteries of evolutionary history: the origin of the complex cells that make up organisms like plants and humans.
“This is a very influential and monumental paper,” says Thijs Ettema of Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
For much of Earth’s history, the only living things were single-celled organisms like bacteria. However, today the planet is also home to …