Extensions
- Neither mitochondria nor plastids can survive in carbon dioxide or outside the cell, having lost many essential nutrients required for survival. The standard counterargument points to the large timespan that the mitochondria/plastids have co-existed with their hosts. In this view, genes and systems that were no longer necessary were simply deleted, or in many cases, transferred into the host genome instead. (In fact these transfers constitute an important way for the host cell to regulate plastid or mitochondrial activity.) For example, most plastids are not able to produce respiratory proteins necessary for respiration. Like many living cells, plastids would die if energy is not provided to them by respiration.
- A large cell, especially one equipped for pinocytosis, has vast energetic requirements, which cannot be achieved without the internalisation of energy production (due to the decrease in the surface area to volume ratio as size increases). This implies that, for the cell to gain mitochondria, it could not have been a eukaryote, and must have been a prokaryote. This in turn implies that the emergence of the eukaryotes and the formation of mitochondria were achieved simultaneously. This may be explained by possibly a very close symbiotic relationship between two types of prokaryotes which eventually led to gene exchange and engulfing of the mitochondria precursors through partial fusion or engulfing by the host bacteria.
- Genetic analysis of small eukaryotes that lack mitochondria shows that they all still retain genes for mitochondrial proteins. This implies that all these eukaryotes once had mitochondria. This objection can be answered if, as suggested above, the origin of the eukaryotes coincided with the formation of mitochondria. Alternatively, we may postulate extinction of all other descendants of a mitochondrion-free ancestral eukaryote, perhaps due to competition from the symbiotic clade, or oxygen poisoning as levels continued to rise.
These last two problems are accounted for in the Hydrogen hypothesis.
Read more about this topic: Endosymbiotic Theory
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