Endosymbiosis Essay

Mitochondrial Origin and Endosymbiosis Numerous biological processes depend on the generation and recycling of ATP to maintain homeostasis and carry out vital roles within a cell. Without mitochondria, the generation of ATP via oxidative phosphorylation would not occur. Cellular energy metabolism generates the most ATP within the mitochondria and during oxidative phosphorylation. Comparison of the different endosymbiosis theories, evolutionary time frames, mechanisms, and genetic testing can help pinpoint the origin of mitochondria and how they have grown to play such an important role in eukaryotic cells leading to the complexity of life today. Three different endosymbiosis hypothesis are the Archezoa hypothesis, the hydrogen hypothesis, and the syntrophic hypothesis. The different endosymbiosis theories present and contain evidence …show more content…
Clustering was also performed on 1,847 bacteria and 134 archaea containing a total of 6,103,025 sequences. All sequences were clustered via the domain origin. The domain clusters were further organized by a reciprocal best cluster approach (3). The data was plotted out by black tick marks that clearly represented a gene presence within the taxon. The eukaryote-prokaryote clusters show a distinct pattern and were densely packed together and distributed among a certain group of prokaryotes. The distribution of the eukaryote-prokaryote clusters showed an undisputable imprint of endosymbiosis in the evolution of eukaryotic organisms (3). The experiment performed a genetic test among the large number of organisms which were plotted out, which allowed one to see the similarities of the presence or non-presence of particular genes that belonged to each taxon. Further investigation and comparison of different genomes can help draw a more vivid picture of the lineages of different