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The hemimastigotes analyzed by the Dalhousie team were found by Eglit during a spring hike with some other students along the Bluff Wilderness Trail outside Halifax a couple of years ago.
She often has empty sample vials in her pockets or bags, and scooped a few tablespoons of dirt into one of them from the side of the trail. Back at the lab, she soaked the soil in water, which often revives microbes that have gone dormant, waiting for the next big rainstorm. Over the next few weeks, she checked on the dish through a microscope to see what might be swimming around. |
Hemimastigophora is a novel supra-kingdom-level lineage of eukaryotes
To understand how evolutionarily distinct the hemimastigote lineage is, imagine the eukaryotic tree splayed out before you on the ground as a narrowing set of paths, which begin with places for all living groups of eukaryotes near your toes and converge far in the distance at our common ancestor.
Starting at our mammalian tip, walk down the path and back into history, past the fork where our lineage diverged from reptiles and birds, past the turnoffs for fishes, for starfish and for insects, and then farther still, beyond the split that separates us from fungi. If you turn around and look back, all the diverse organisms you passed fall within just one of the six eukaryote supergroups. Hemimastigotes are still up ahead, in a supergroup of their own, on a path that nothing else occupies. |
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