Eukaryotes
Eukaryotes invented organization, if we use the literal definition of “organize”: to be furnished with organs.
Nearly all of them have mitochondria, which produce energy to fuel biochemical reactions. Any eukaryotic lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.
And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that
Inside a eukaryotic cell are self-contained, membrane-bound bundles that perform special functions, called organelles.
All eukaryotic cells —animal, plant, fungus or protist —have a nucleus that encloses and protects DNA.
Nearly all of them have mitochondria, which produce energy to fuel biochemical reactions. Any eukaryotic lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.
And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that
- Assemble proteins,
- Store water,
- Turn sunlight into energy,
- Digest biomolecules,
- Get rid of waste, and more.
If prokaryotes are a loose pile of papers on the floor, eukaryotes are a sophisticated filing system that binds pages into packets and labels them.
“They’ve got the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, peroxisomes, lysosomes, vacuoles —all this machinery not present in bacteria or archaea cells,” said Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
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