A MICROBE discovered in an undersea vent north of Iceland has the most rudimentary genome yet seen. Nanoarchaeum equitans belongs to the archaea, the most primitive of the three kingdoms of life.
Its genome sequence – the smallest known for a living organism, with just 490,000 nucleotide units – was published last year. Now an analysis shows that the microbe can do next to nothing for itself. Instead it relies on Ignicoccus, another archaeon which lives near the hot vents.
N. equitans has genes for replication and may be able to make energy from primitive ATP (Proceedings of the National Academy…
