Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s been a puzzle that has stumped humanity for ages. However, an ancient cellular clue may have finally answered this timeless question!
A team in Switzerland says that long before chickens clucked or embryos developed, a microscopic marine creature was rehearsing the intricate dance of cellular division. This served as a billion-year-old preview of life’s most fundamental magic.
Specifically, scientists at the University of Geneva discovered something extraordinary in Chromosphaera perkinsii, a single-celled organism that seems to preview animal embryonic development. It turns out that the genetic machinery for creating eggs — the fundamental starting point of complex life — existed over a billion years before animals emerged.
“It’s fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years,” says Marine Olivetta, the study’s first author, in a university release.
In other words, the “egg” came before the “chicken” — but not in the way you might think. The cellular processes that allow an egg to develop into a complex organism were already developing in simple, single-celled life forms. This tiny organism shows that the blueprint for creating life — the ability to divide, specialize, and develop — predates animals by hundreds of millions of years. This research is published in the journal Nature.
The organism undergoes a process called palintomy — synchronized cell divisions without growth — creating multicellular colonies that bear a striking resemblance to early embryonic stages. These colonies persist for about a third of the organism’s life cycle and contain at least two distinct cell types, an unprecedented complexity for a single-celled creature.
Intriguingly, when C. perkinsii reaches its maximum size, it divides into three types of free-living cells: flagellates, amoeboflagellates, and dividing cells. Like a microscopic dress rehearsal for animal life, these cells activate different genes in successive waves, mimicking early embryonic development.
“Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behavior shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth,” explains lead researcher Omaya Dudin.
The discovery doesn’t just solve this age-old scientific puzzle — it challenges our understanding of life’s complexity. It also suggests that the genetic tools for creating sophisticated organisms existed far earlier than previously thought, waiting in the wings of evolutionary history.
Who knew the secret to understanding life’s grand performance was hiding in a tiny marine organism, patiently waiting to tell its story?