Three truths
- Timed
- Branched off about 2.6 billion years ago · the last 62% of life's story
- Named
- ≈2,000 named living species · 0.1% of all named
- Weighed
- Part of Bacteria (≈70 Gt C), not measured separately.
Bacteria · class
Alphaproteobacteria
Living · roughly 2,000 described species
A class of bacteria with a special place in our history: mitochondria, the energy-producing parts of our cells, descend from an alphaproteobacterium taken up by an ancestral cell.
One of these moved into another cell for good. Its descendants power your cells as mitochondria.
Key characteristics
- Includes nitrogen-fixing partners of plant roots
- Includes intracellular parasites
- Closest living bacterial relatives of mitochondria
- Branched off
- About 2.6 billion years ago (approximate)
- Parent lineage
- Pseudomonadota (Proteobacteria)
Classification
Sources
- Alphaproteobacteria (Wikipedia) · Wikipedia
- TimeTree: the timescale of life · TimeTree
- Open Tree of Life · Open Tree of Life
- Tree of Life Web Project · Tree of Life Web Project