My journey from learning about endosymbiosis and becoming a plant.

 Okay, so this post will be more theoretical than anything else due to my interest in the subject. Recently I was afforded the opportunity to present one research subject based on evolution and I had chosen an article about inducing endosymbiosis in fungal cells. Endosymbiosis is basically a mutually beneficial relationship between two living things but one of those entities lives inside the other. The most common example of endosymbiosis would be the mitochondria and its general relationship with the cell. However the study "Inducing novel endosymbioses by implanting bacteria in fungi" began by first seeing if we could induce an endosymbiotic relationship in the first place by implanting a bacterium into its endosymbiotic partner just to see if it was generally possible. They then further the study by testing whether other bacteria such as E.coli were able to form an endosymbiotic relationship with fungi. Overall they found that adaptive evolution was at play in that the fungi and bacterium began to adapt to each other and rely on each other in the endosymbiotic partnership. Although plant cells and animal cells both have a mitochondrion, this study shows that we can switch them and observe the effects that it would have on both cells, or we could implant a bacterium that produces ATP in a more inefficient or efficient method which would be interesting to see in the future.

Addendum- 12/2/2024: After doing some further thinking, I realized the full potential of this study in succeeding to implant an endosymbiotic relationship in a cell. Mitochondrion and chloroplasts are not the only cell organelles that we could replace with the bacterium, we may also be able to redefine medicine entirely by creating designer cells with organelles that would have secondary defenses to viruses and foreign bacterium due to cells often being hosts for those very foreign invaders to multiply and become a system-wide threat. If we could create a bacterium that specifically targeted foreign bacterium with the cell's cytoplasm, we would be able to create a treatment for most infections without worrying about if they were gram-negative or positive. 

Giger, G. H., Ernst, C., Richter, I., Gassler, T., Field, C. M., Sintsova, A., Kiefer, P., Gäbelein, C. G., Guillaume–Gentil, O., Scherlach, K., Bortfeld-Miller, M., Zambelli, T., Sunagawa, S., Künzler, M., Hertweck, C., & Vorholt, J. A. (2024, October 2). Inducing novel endosymbioses by implanting bacteria in fungi. Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08010-x