Scientists find first animal that doesn't

But it still remains a mystery: how exactly he survives?

It was previously thought that the life of all multicellular organisms depended on oxygen. But Israeli scientists recently found a multicellular creature that doesn 't need oxygen to survive.

This year, a team of researchers led by Dayana Yahalomi of Tel Aviv University discovered that a jellyfish-like parasite called Henneguya salminicola had no mitochondrial genome. This means that it does not breathe and has no oxygen dependence.

This discovery not only changes our understanding of how life can work here, on Earth, but it can also make a difference to finding out-of-the-box life.

Life began to develop the ability to absorb oxygen - that is, breathe - about more than 1.45 billion years ago. A large archaeon absorbed a smaller bacterium, and somehow a bacterium in new home was useful for both of them, and they stayed together.

These symbiotic relationships resulted in the two organisms evolving together, and eventually those bacteria that ended up inside became organelles called mitochondria. Each cell of your body, except erythrocytes, contains a large amount of mitochondria. They are necessary for the respiratory process of the cellums.

They cleave oxygen to form a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which multicellular organisms use to power cellular processes.

'We know there are fixtures that allow some organisms to thrive in low oxygen or hypoxia conditions. Some unicellular organisms have developed mitochondria-related organelles for anaerobic metabolism; But the possibility of exclusively anaerobic multicellular organisms has been the subject of some scientific discussion", - scientists say.

It is a сnidarium belonging to the same type as corals, jellyfish and anemones.

Hidden inside its master, the tiny сnidarium can survive in rather hypoxic conditions. But how exactly this happens is difficult to understand without studying the DNA of the creature, what researchers already did.

The researchers used deep sequencing and fluorescent microscopy to scrutinize H. salminicola and found it had lost its mitochondrial genome. In addition, it has also lost its ability to aerobic breathing, and nearly all nuclear genes are involved in the transcription and replication of mitochondria.

Similar to single-cell organisms, it has developed mitochondria-bound organelles, but they are also unusual - they have folds on the inner membrane that are non-visible.

These results show that the multicellular organism learned to survive without oxygen for breathing.

How exactly he survives? It still remains a mystery. But in many years, they have mostly turned from a free-living jellyfish ancestor to the parasite that we can see nowadays.

This discovery confirms that adaptation to the anaerobic environment is not unique to unicellular eukaryotes, but also develops in multicellular parasitic animals.

Some microorganisms may survive in a hydrogen-dominated environment. This study thus proves the viability of some microorganisms in exoplanet atmospheres.

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