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Science 13 March 1998:
Vol. 279. no. 5357, pp. 1633 - 1634
DOI: 10.1126/science.279.5357.1633
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Research News

EVOLUTION:
Did the First Complex Cell Eat Hydrogen?

Gretchen Vogel

The mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles of complex cells, are believed to have once been free-living bacteria that were simply eaten by an ancestral cell. But in last week's issue of Nature, researchers argue that the first complex cell, or eukaryote, was a partnership between two mutually dependent microbes. The host cell was a methanogen, a microbe that consumes hydrogen and carbon dioxide and produces methane, and the future mitochondrion was a bacterium that made hydrogen and carbon dioxide as waste products.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)