Overview
- An international team led by the University of Texas at Austin assembled more than 13,000 microbial genomes from roughly 15 terabytes of environmental DNA collected across multiple marine expeditions.
- Hundreds of newly recovered Asgard genomes nearly doubled the group’s known diversity and expanded their enzymatic repertoire, including a doubling of known enzymatic classes.
- Genomic analyses highlight Heimdallarchaeia, the lineage closest to eukaryotes, with genes consistent with oxygen use or tolerance.
- AlphaFold2 predictions show several Heimdallarchaeia proteins closely resemble eukaryotic components for oxygen-based, energy-efficient metabolism.
- Samples from shallow coastal sediments and the water column place oxygen-tolerant Asgards alongside aerobic alphaproteobacteria, supporting an oxygen-enabled endosymbiosis scenario reported in Nature.