Re: Life: Turn it upside down!

On 11/04/2024 14:41, Arkalen wrote:

I'm not sure you're even completely right on Microsporidia, cf this paper:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00436-020-06657-9
 It does describe microsporidia as using the host's ATP, but also of using glycolysis to generate ATP:
 "These parasites have lost canonical mitochondria and the oxidative
phosphorylation pathway, so that glycolysis is the only way to
generate ATP (Heinz et al. 2012; Corradi 2015). During the
intracellular development stage, microsporidia apparently do
not use their energy metabolism (Dolgikh et al. 2011) and
instead satisfy their energy demands by “stealing” ATP from
the host cell using unique nucleotide carriers acquired via
horizontal transfer from bacteria (Tsaousis et al. 2008;
Alexander et al. 2016)."
 

Microsporidia are a large group (1500 named species, but estimates of the actual number runs to a million or more), so statements may be true of some rather than all microsporidia. Repeating my original web search I find
"Indeed, one group of microsporidia, the Enterocytozoonidae, has lost multiple proteins in the glycolytic pathway, effectively inhibiting ATP generation"
--
alias Ernest Major