2 ms·
The authors characterized an obligate parasite that lost its mitochondria and steals energy from the host instead. While this is technically the first animal to
by ak217 7y ago
The authors characterized an obligate parasite that lost its mitochondria and steals energy from the host instead. While this is technically the first animal to be found to lose its mitochondria, it's not the first eukaryote.
They didn't find a novel eukaryotic energy system. There are many parasites that lose essential cellular machinery because the host provides it, this is just a relatively complex one.
- pvaldes 7y agoThe group is still poorly known and giving surprise after surprise in the last decades. Complex life cycle with two totally different kind of spores. Some were wrongly chategorised as two different species, other classified as animals are now known to be fungus (and two different lineages of very distant related fungus noneless)... Really misunderstood group for most of the modern scientific period. The idea that there was not one extant parasitic "jellyfish" [1] , but thousands of a new branch of parasitic cnidarians was revolucionary at 90's. [1] Technically they are not Scyphozoa, Cubozoa or Hydrozoa, so they are not jellyfishes (neither corals).