Primitive cell replication

Click on the image to open a larger version. Copyright: Jeffery Errington

“Although this was reproduced in the paper...it is the actual movie that sent me hopping around our house looking for someone to tell. For me, it was one of those moments that happens only a few times, if ever, in a lifetime in science.

We had managed to generate bacterial cells that grow devoid of their usual thick cell wall. Having done this, we wondered how they would replicate – we assumed it would be little different from the “binary fission” process used by most conventional cells. However, when we got the time lapse imaging to work, the first movie showed this remarkable and completely unexpected process. A long tube of cytoplasm was extruded from the parent cell (arrow), which abruptly pinched off into about 5 separate progeny that remained linked for a while in a chain. We suggest in the paper that this mechanism may be the vestige of a mechanism of cell replication used by primitive cells, before the invention of the cell wall and therefore very early in the evolution of life on earth.”