The paper Interspecies Microbial Fusion and Large-Scale Exchange of Cytoplasmic Proteins and RNA in a Syntrophic Clostridium Coculture [1]:

> Here, transmission electron microscopy and electron tomography demonstrated cell wall and membrane fusions between the two organisms, whereby C. ljungdahlii appears to invade C. acetobutylicum pole to pole.

Hopefully this gives insight into the mechanism underlying symbiogenesis [2] that influenced the evolution of life. Mitochondria and chloroplasts are the most important examples of symbiogenesis.

[1] https://mbio.asm.org/content/11/5/e02030-20

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis

For anyone interested in this sort of thing, I would recommend a Youtube channel called 'Journey To The Microcosmos' hosted by Hank Green.

This world is so bizarre it defies belief

O'Rlly? :)

Try this https://www.quantamagazine.org/extra-dna-may-make-unlikely-h...

“I’m still confused. My jaw is still on the floor,” said Prosanta Chakrabarty, an ichthyologist at Louisiana State University and the curator of fishes at its Museum of Natural Science. “It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,” he said.

I think this may be the weirder.

Thanks, I guess. Another pit of awe-inspiring procrastination.

This feels very much like a prototypical version of sex with two 'haploid' cells merging to form a 'diploid'.

It's not quite clear from the article what happens to these merged cells in the long-run. Do they continue to reproduce, forming effectively a new species of bacterium?

"The team found that C. ljungdahlii invades C. acetobutylicum. The two organisms combine cell walls and membranes and exchange proteins and RNA to form hybrid cells, some of which continue to divide and in fact differentiate into the characteristic sporulation program"

I read that as saying the new chimera (...?) is viable.

Yes, but it skirts a bit - do the resultant spores produce new members of the combined organism, or do they segregate back into the parent species?

It feels like, maybe the latter

Given "and RNA to form hybrid cells" it would be hard to see them unhybridising; would that even be possible once you've mixed up so much? So I read the former where you read the latter, but it needs clarifying doesn't it.

That's not what the article is describing.

The concept of bacterial conjugation is know since 1946

And things can turn much weirder than what the article is showing...

Interesting - please continue...