The Endosymbiotic Theory: Cellular Theory

Biology Semester 1 Research Project

Cellular Process

Meagan Baggett

4th Period

The endosymbiotic theory explains how eukaryotic cells may have evolved from prokaryotic cells. Symbiosis is a close relationship between two different organisms. The discovery of the endosymbiotic theory took hundreds of years to be considered as real and was eventually it was finalized. The endosymbiotic theory is believed to be first introduced and described by Andreas Schimper in 1883. Schimper was a German botanist and phytogeographer. He was born on May 12, 1856 and he passed away on September 9, 1901, at the age of forty-five. After studying at the University of Strassburg from 1874 to 1878, in the process acquiring his Ph.D, He left Germany

Konstantin Mereschkowski was born on August 4, 1855 and he died on January 9, 1921. He was a Russian biologist and botanist. From 1875 to 1880, he worked for his degree at the University of St. Petersburg. Upon graduating, he began to travel to places such as France and Germany, meeting famous scientists and studying. In 1886, he and his wife, Olga Petrovna Sultanova, emigrated from Russia to Crimea, where he began work as a botanist studying grapes. In 1898, he, his wife, and his son left Crimea and moved to America. He worked as a botanist in California, until moving back to Russia in 1902. As curator of zoology at Kazan University, he began to develop his ideas on the symbiotic origins of complex cells. He argued that the cell organelles, the nucleus, and the chloroplast are all descendants of bacteria that evolved into an intracellular symbiosis with amoebae. His ideas and theories are quite similar to those later developed. Mereschkowski later killed himself in 1921 due to depression, poverty, and a life of

Lynn Margulis was born on March 5, 1938 and she died on November 22, 2011. She was an American evolutionary theorist and biologist, science author, educator, and popularizer. In 1953, at the age of fifteen, she was accepted into the University of Chicago Laboratory School. In 1957, at the age of nineteen, Margulis earned a BA from the University of Chicago in Liberal Arts. She then completed her master’s degree at the University of Chicago in genetics and zoology at the age of twenty-two. She graduated in 1960 with her MS in genetics and biology from the University of Wisconsin after studying under Hans Ris and Walter Plaut. Margulis then pursued research at the University of California under the zoologist Max Alfert. In 1962, while she was still studying at the University of California, she was offered a research associateship, as well as a lectureship at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. It was while working there that she obtained her PhD from the University of California in 1965. In 1966, Margulis moved to Boston University. There, she truly began studying diving into the endosymbiotic theory. She wrote a theoretical paper titled “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells”. The paper was “rejected by about fifteen scientific journals”, Margulis recalled. The paper was eventually accepted by “Journal of Theoretical Biology”, and is today considered a landmark to the modern endosymbiotic theory.