“In a sense, analyzing the Naegleria genome shows us what it would be like to be on this planet more than a billion years ago, and what kind of organisms were around then and what they might have looked like,” said Simon E. Prochnik, a JGI and UC Berkeley bioinformaticist and coauthor of the Cell paper.Naegleria is a common soil amoeba – the sequenced organism was isolated from the mud in a grove of eucalyptus trees on the UC Berkeley campus – that, under stress, quickly grows two flagella, like sperm tails, that it uses to swim around. It has a third identity, a hard cyst, that can persist in the soil until conditions become damp and warm enough for it to turn into an amoeba.
Read more at redOrbit.