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Marine microbiology: Origins of Death

Nature volume 453, pages 583–585 (2008)Cite this article

Programmed cell death is usually seen as the unique prerogative of plants and animals. So how is it that photosynthetic plankton have been killing themselves by uncannily similar methods for billions of years? Nick Lane investigates.

One evening 20 years ago, Paul Falkowski left the lab so tired that he omitted to refresh the solution in his culture flasks of Emiliania huxleyi, one of the world's most widespread coccolithophores. The following morning he was shocked to find the flasks full of clear solution, the merest sediment lining the bottom, all that remained of the plankton. “I had never seen anything like it,” he recalls. “They just dissolved overnight.”

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References

  1. Berman-Frank, I., Bidle, K. D., Haramaty, L. & Falkowski, P. G. Limnol. Oceanogr. 49, 997–1005 (2004).

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Authors
  1. Nick Lane
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Nick Lane is author of Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life.

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Apoptosis Insight

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Paul Falkowski’s team at Rutgers

Eugene Koonin's group at NCBI

Nick Lane’s website

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Lane, N. Marine microbiology: Origins of Death. Nature 453, 583–585 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/453583a

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