'Can't Live without You:' Essential Animal-Bacterial Relationships

摘要

For billions of years, the bacteria (Eubacteria and Archea) had this planet to themselves. This exclusivity changed with the origin of the eukaryotes, little more than 1 billion years ago. In one of the greatest turning points in the history of life, eukaryotic cellular organization permitted greater biological complexity than has evolved in bacteria-at every level from the individual cell to multicellular organisms with divisions of labor and social interactions among organisms. Although the diversity of both eukaryotes and bacteria is predominantly at the unicellular level, only the eukaryotes include large radiations of organisms that interact with the environment at spatial scales of 1 cm or more.