In my effort to understand our world and my place in it, I seek reliable and well-founded information. It is necessary to account for bias that is ubiquitous from all reporters of such information (we all are biased in favor of our own understanding), and Plato's observation that all he knew is that he knew nothing is a very good mechanism for rejecting our intrinsic biases. Anton Petrov posts daily on Odysee and I find his forthright exposition of the new research his wide ranging interest in science from a layman's perspective reveals well supported by the foundation of humility Plato shared.
The most recent post of Anton's I have watched discusses a group of Archaea known as Asgardia that are some of the most ancient forms of life on Earth, and their interactions with other bacteria as mediated by viruses. He cites the recent (June, 2022) Nature article linked below, and points out that ~7% of our genome is derived from viruses, which hints at how features of eukaryotes like chloroplasts and mitochondria, likely once separate species, became incorporated into complex multicellular life.
"Asgard archaea are globally distributed prokaryotic microbes proposed to be closely related to eukaryotes1,2. Their genomic composition indicates that they are descendants of the archaeal cell that gave rise to the first eukaryotic common ancestor3. Asgard biodiversity has expanded greatly in recent years due to the recovery of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from a range of marine and terrestrial aquatic sediments4. The recovery of these Asgard MAGs has resulted in predictions about their metabolic abilities and evolutionary histories. Recently, an anaerobic slow-growing Asgard, Lokiarchaeota, has been cultured and appears to have syntrophic dependencies with bacteria, a finding that supports previous omics-based predictions5. Interactions between bacteria and Asgards are thought to have led to the formation of the first mitochondria-containing eukaryotic cell5,6 and it is also hypothesized that interactions with viruses contributed to the origin of complex cellular life7. This observation is based on the nucleus-like cytoplasmic viral factories of some nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDVs)8 and jumbo bacteriophages9,10 that allow for replication within the host cytoplasm and the decoupling of transcription and translation7. Additionally, representatives from the Mimiviridae family possess mRNA capping pathways homologous to those present in eukaryotes11. Putative viral proteins have been identified within Lokiarchaeota genomes12, suggesting a role of viruses in the exchange of genetic information and the evolution of Asgards."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-022-01150-8
This is an extremely fascinating aspect of biology, well illustrating the almost inconceivable complexity of biochemistry and genetics, with specific and extreme import to understanding ourselves, and our place in life on Earth. I hope you find it as interesting and edifying as I do.
