Reacción a "A Spanish study published in Nature reimagines the origin of our cells as a story of microbial alliances"

Bioinformatics continues to illuminate the "black hole of biology" from which the eukaryotic cell emerged in all its complexity. In this work, the authors follow in the footsteps of Margaret Dayhoff, the mother of bioinformatics, who, among other foundational contributions, provided the first solid evidence for an alphaproteobacterial origin of the eukaryotic mitochondria. It was then that Lynn Margulis's endosymbiotic theory gained the relevance it holds today.

The presented article is technically rigorous and sound. The initial hypothesis that more prokaryotes were involved was circulating within the scientific community, but this work adds much more evidence and implicates different bacterial groups, including giant viruses, as mediators in the gene transfer that led to the emergence of the first eukaryote. The most relevant consequence of this discussion is that there may have been a gradual acquisition through successive evolutionary events. My group's line of research, which combines computational biology and physics, suggests that something more happened: a synergy where the whole exceeded the sum of its parts. At that moment, the biological transition occurred, which we believe happened abruptly at the genetic level.

Certainly, work like this demonstrates humanity's biotechnological capabilities. Just 25 years ago, it would have seemed implausible that evidence of this kind could be presented (bear in mind that the origin of the eukaryotic cell occurred billions of years ago—nine zeros in the number of years). Sequencing and bioinformatics are achieving this, and paleogenomics accomplishes something similar, reconstructing the history of populations and even extinct species. It happened so long ago that searching through those sequences feels like searching through coffee grounds. But the authors show us that our biotechnological capacity is still valid to find answers through that route.