Tracing the Archaeal Origins of Eukaryotic Membrane-Trafficking System Building Blocks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In contrast to prokaryotes, eukaryotic cells are characterized by a complex set of internal membrane-bound compartments. A subset of these, and the protein machineries that move material between them, define the membrane-trafficking system (MTS), the emergence of which represents a landmark in eukaryotic evolution. Unlike mitochondria and plastids, MTS organelles have autogenous origins. Much of the MTS machinery is composed of building blocks, including small GTPase, coiled-coil, beta-propeller + alpha-solenoid, and longin domains. Despite the identification of prokaryotic proteins containing these domains, only few represent direct orthologues, leaving the origins and early evolution of the MTS poorly understood. Here, we present an in-depth analysis of MTS building block homologues in the composite genome of Lokiarchaeum, the recently discovered archaeal sister clade of eukaryotes, yielding several key insights. We identify two previously unreported Eukaryotic Signature Proteins; orthologues of the Gtr/Rag family GTPases, involved in target of rapamycin complex signaling, and of the RLC7 dynein component. We could not identify golgin or SNARE (coiled-coil) or beta-propeller + alpha-solenoid orthologues, nor typical MTS domain fusions, suggesting that these either were lost from Lokiarchaeum or emerged later in eukaryotic evolution. Furthermore, our phylogenetic analyses of lokiarchaeal GTPases support a split into Ras-like and Arf-like superfamilies, with different prokaryotic antecedents, before the advent of eukaryotes. While no GTPase activating proteins or exchange factors were identified, we show that Lokiarchaeum encodes numerous roadblock domain proteins and putative longin domain proteins, confirming the latter's origin from Archaea. Altogether, our study provides new insights into the emergence and early evolution of the eukaryotic membrane-trafficking system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".