Egg or Chicken, who was the first?
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Researchers have studied a single-celled organism discovered in Hawaii in 2017. The results have shed some light on this question.
Who was the first? The egg or the chicken? Scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) believe they have found the answer to this age-old question. They think it was the egg. The researchers reached this conclusion by examining a single-celled organism called ‘Chromosphaera perkinsii’, discovered in marine sediments near Hawaii in 2017. This organism has been present on Earth for more than a billion years, ‘well before the appearance of the first animals’.
The scientific team led by Omaya Dudin, assistant professor of biochemistry at the Faculty of Science, observed that this species formed multicellular structures similar to those of animal embryos as it grew. This suggests that the genetic programmes responsible for embryonic development – by which the fertilised egg is transformed – were present before the emergence of animal life. In other words, ‘nature would have had the genetic tools to “create eggs” long before it “invented chickens”’, summarises a press release. The study was published in the journal Nature.
Source: PR UNIGE
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