Microbiologists took 12 years to grow a microbe tied to complex life’s origins
Cramped in a small submarine 2,500 meters below the Pacific’s surface in 2006, microbiologist Hiroyuki Imachi scanned the ocean floor for signs of microbial life. As the sub drifted over the bottom of Japan’s Nankai Trough — a hotbed of understudied microbes living off methane bubbling up from tectonic faults — Imachi spotted a nest of small clams against a whitish microbial mat, suggestive of an active methane seep below. The submersible’s robotic arm plunged a 25-centimeter tube into the blackish-gray sediment to retrieve a core of muck. It would take another 12 years of lab work for Imachi and colleagues to isolate a prize they hadn’t even set out to find — a single-celled microbe from an ancient lineage of Archaea, a domain of life superficially similar to bacteria. That find could help biologists reconstruct one of life’s greatest leaps toward complexity, from simple bacteria-like organisms to more complicated eukaryotes, the enormous group of chromosome-carrying creatures that includes humans, platypuses, fungi and many others....