New clues to origins of complicated life revealed by MSU biologist in Nature journal

Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State biologist Matthew W. Brown, the college’s Donald L. Hall Professor of Biology, is a part of a global analysis staff whose groundbreaking discovery is featured at the moment [Nov. 19] in Nature—one of many world’s most prestigious scientific journals. The printed analysis finds a brand new organism and phylum, reshaping the tree of life.

The research “Rare Microbial Relict Sheds Light on an Ancient Eukaryotic Supergroup” describes the invention of Solarion arienae, a beforehand unknown unicellular organism that gives new perception into the earliest phases of complicated life on Earth. This microscopic protist—a tiny, single-cell organism seen solely by way of a microscope—was found by means of collaboration between Brown’s lab at MSU and Ivan Čepička’s laboratory at Charles University within the Czech Republic. The organism shows two distinct cell varieties and a novel predatory construction not like any seen earlier than.

By analyzing Solarion arienae’s genetic and mobile make-up, the analysis staff recognized traces of historic mitochondrial pathways—molecular equipment inherited from the micro organism that initially gave rise to mitochondria.

These findings counsel that the earliest eukaryotes have been much more metabolically versatile than their fashionable descendants.

The research additionally establishes a brand new phylum, Caelestes, and introduces a beforehand unrecognized eukaryotic supergroup, Disparia, reshaping the deepest ranges of the tree of life and reworking scientists’ understanding of how complicated cells developed.

Brown, who served as co-corresponding creator, mentioned the invention “provides a uncommon window into early eukaryotic evolution, serving to us reconstruct how the constructing blocks of complicated life first got here collectively.

“The existence of Solarion and the discovery of its closest relatives fundamentally expands our view of eukaryotic biodiversity, supporting a revised framework of early mitochondrial evolution, and to me, most importantly demonstrates how classical cultivation can still reveal lineages that reshape our understanding of life’s deepest branches,” Brown added.

Last month, Brown was named the 2025 recipient of MSU’s Ralph E. Powe Research Excellence Award, the college’s highest honor for analysis achievement. The award, established in reminiscence of MSU alumnus and former vice chairman for analysis Ralph E. Powe, acknowledges one school member annually whose work exemplifies innovation and world affect.

A number one determine in evolutionary biology, Brown has printed greater than 70 peer-reviewed papers with practically 9,000 citations and secured practically $4 million in analysis funding. His work explores microorganisms and the way complicated organisms developed from microbial ancestors, combining microscopy, genomics, bioinformatics and evolutionary biology to check how life unfolded throughout eons of time.

Also this fall, Brown acquired new assist from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which awarded an $870,000 collaborative grant to Brown’s MSU lab and one at Texas Tech University, led by Brown’s former MSU graduate pupil and Texas Tech Assistant Professor Alexander Okay. Tice. The challenge will broaden a broadly used software program suite that helps scientists assemble large-scale evolutionary datasets with better precision and transparency. The Brown Lab will obtain $436,427 to advance the software’s growth, lengthen its attain throughout the tree of life and host worldwide coaching workshops for evolutionary biologists.

Brown’s work has been featured in a number of high-impact journals, together with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the place his research on 750-million-year-old microbial fossils additionally sheds gentle on Earth’s early evolutionary historical past. His analysis additionally has been supported by a National Science Foundation grant exceeding $1 million to discover the evolutionary historical past of one in all life’s oldest lineages, the Amoebozoa.

Since becoming a member of MSU in 2013, Brown has earned quite a few accolades, together with the 2018 College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Eminent Scholar Award and election as a fellow of the Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing and Biotechnology.

For extra particulars about Brown’s analysis, go to www.amoeba.msstate.edu.

For extra details about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Biological Sciences, go to www.cas.msstate.edu and www.biology.msstate.edu.

Mississippi State University is taking good care of what issues. Learn extra at www.msstate.edu.