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This is an exciting time to study life's origins. New voyages of exploration across continents and oceans have uncovered an incredible diversity of cellular forms, while submarines probing deep-sea vents have found hints of primordial cells seemingly unchanged for billions of years. What drove those earliest cells to make the leap from a streamlined prokaryotic cell plan to the complex and versatile eukaryotic design? Eukaryotic cells are defined by their membrane traffic systems. The apparatus of nuclei, mitochondria and endomembrane organelles connected by vesicular transport is completely absent in prokaryotes. This system allows eukaryotes to sample their environment, change shape, and communicate by contact, traits that are essential for organised sexual reproduction and multicellularity. Understanding the origins of compartmentalised membrane traffic is therefore key to understanding eukaryote evolution. How is the membrane traffic system assembled through dynamic protein interactions and information flow? How did it get this way over billions of years of evolution? How does it benefit the cell to have such a system? We bring together threads from biology, physics and computer science to weave the story of the past, present and future of cellular life. |