For the first time in history, a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia (USA) has found an organism that can produce chlorophyll but does not photosynthesize.
This peculiar living thing is called “corallicolid” because it is found in 70% of the world’s corals and may provide clues on how to protect coral reefs in the future, something that, unfortunately, seems to have become an issue. vital.
It’s funny, but it hadn’t been located until now
“This is the second most abundant coral cohabitant on the planet and it has not been seen until now,” says Patrick Keeling, a botanist at the University of British Columbia and principal investigator supervising the study reported in the journal Nature. “This organism raises entirely new biochemical questions. It looks like a parasite, and it is definitely not photosynthetic. But it still produces chlorophyll.”
What is chlorophyll for?
Chlorophyll is the green pigment found in plants and algae that allows them to absorb energy from sunlight during photosynthesis. How is it that this organism can produce chlorophyll without participating in photosynthesis?
“Having chlorophyll without photosynthesis is actually very dangerous because chlorophyll is very good at capturing energy, but without photosynthesis to release energy slowly it’s like living with a pump in your cells,” Keeling says.
The corallicolid live in the gastric cavity of a great variety of corals responsible for the construction of reefs, as well as corals of fungi, anemones, fan corals … They are within the group of species of apicomplexes , that is, a large group of parasites that have a cell compartment called plastid, which is the part of plant cells and algae where photosynthesis takes place. The most famous bee complex is the parasite responsible for malaria, the sporozoite.
Already more than a decade ago, scientists discovered photosynthetic algae related to apicomplexes in healthy corals, indicating that they may have evolved from benign photosynthetic organisms attached to corals before becoming the parasites we know today.
“We do not know why these organisms cling to these genes for photosynthesis. A novel biology is being generated here, something we have not seen before, ” clarifies Waldan Kwong, leader of the work.
Although experts have discovered that several apicomplexes coexist on the planet’s coral reefs, it is precisely the corallicolid that are the most common – which had not been investigated before. The curious thing about this organism is that not only does it have a plastid, but it also possesses all four plastid genes used in the production of chlorophyll. We will have to investigate more in this curious individual to better understand the coral habitat and, of course, find a way to preserve them much better.
Remember that corals are very sensitive to changes in temperature in the water, in the sea, and live in a symbiosis with microscopic algae that live inside them and give them energy. Due to the increase in temperatures in the oceans, the situation is serious, since the last IPCC report presented in October last year estimated that, even with forceful actions to stabilize global warming at 1.5 ° C above the levels pre-industrial, by 2050 we will have lost 70% to 90% of our coral reefs.
Referencia: A widespread coral-infecting apicomplexan with chlorophyll biosynthesis genes. Waldan K. Kwong, Javier del Campo, Varsha Mathur, Mark J. A. Vermeij & Patrick J. Keeling. Nature volume 568, pages103–107 (2019) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1072-z
Crédito imagen: Patrick Keeling Lab, UBC.
