Fantastic - the nitroplast joining a pretty exclusive club there.

Bigelowii itself seems very interesting, even without this nitrogen fixing organelle, having two completely different phases to it's life - one in a weird dodecahedral calcareous shell and one without as a mobile flagellate. Apparently it can exist and reproduce in either form, and occasionally switch forms. It took scientists a long while to realize the two forms are actually the same species.

Two phases of Bigelowii.

Deuce Bigelowii.

Huh.

Damn! :)

This is a nicely written article, which feels like a rarity lately.

was just thinking the same: it's so refreshingly well written (!)

it's a new model, human-sol-ultra, highly advisable to use in loops.

Kudos to the scientists everywhere that continue to explore the mysteries of nature

I'm skeptical of the "magic noodles" bit as mentioned in the article.

The "tokoroten" noodles are just agar.

Pretty much everyone in biology tries growing cells in agar, right? Surely that can't have been an amazing discovery?

The recent paper in explicitly discusses the matter "The prepared tokoroten was frozen at −20C, then thawed at room temperature. The thawed tokoroten separated into agar and liquid parts naturally,... " https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00318884.2026.26...

I've had cells growing fine in 20 L Cytiva wave bags and then fail to grow in 20 L Sartorius wave bags. Anyone that tells you they know how a cell grows is lying to themselves :)

Maybe there is something else in Gelidium amansii that it needs, if the tokoroten was produced in the traditional way?

The plastid wiki might be germane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid

Edit: "It was a type of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii. Hagino fondly just calls it Bigelowii."

Is this pronounced bigggie-lowie?

It’s presumably named after Henry Bigelow (like several other things in oceanography), so my guess would be /bɪɡəˈlə͡ʊwi.a͡ɪ/.

A 20 year search leads to the discovery of the nitroplast, a nitrogen-fixing organelle hiding inside algae.

Since computational biology is all about simulation, do the chloroplast, the mitochondria, and now the nitro-last, have definitions that could be actively simulated ?

Practically speaking, while we could simulate them at a fairly approximate level, it wouldn't really tell us anything useful.

CO2, you say? Human activity produces tens of percent of the bioavailable nitrogen.

A facile comparison: the problem with CO2 involves the equilibrium level (or lack thereof) between the flows of what is emitted to the pool versus removed.

In contrast, excessive bio-available nitrogen is unlikely to build up, not when most of the biosphere is waiting to grab it and (relatively quickly) turn it back into inert N2 gas.