TAKE a walk in the woods and what do you see? Trees reaching skywards with birds in their branches and, at their roots, mushrooms pushing through the leaf litter. These, and all the organisms you can see with the naked eye, have one fundamental similarity. Like us, they are constructed from the same kind of cell. Under the microscope, the differences between plants, animals and fungi fall away to reveal a common internal structure.
The biosphere would be unimaginably different had this "eukaryotic" cell never evolved, making its origin one of the most critical events in the development of life on Earth. Almost everybody agrees that the complex eukaryotic cell evolved from a simple ancestor. The question is how.
Inside the eukaryotic cell is an intricate meshwork of membranes called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), interspersed with other structures such as the energy-generating mitochondria. At the core is the nucleus, ...
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