Tag: alga
This marine alga is the first known eukaryote to pull nitrogen from air
It’s time to welcome a new type of cell to the club of living things that can harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Until now, the only lifeforms thought to pull nitrogen from the air and turn it into a biologically useful form were bacteria and archaea. But the discovery of a special ammonia factory inside a single-celled ocean alga adds eukaryotes — organisms with membrane-bound structures called organelles — to the list, researchers report in the April 12 Science.