This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

If you were searching for a life form unlike anything known to science, where would you look?

Scientists at Charles University in Prague, they looked in the

poop of a pet chinchilla. They were isolating a lot of various strains from various environments,

including their own pets.

Anna Kofska, an evolutionary biologist who collaborated on the work.

She is now at the University of British Columbia.

Scientists like to isolate things from everywhere where it's possible.

They found a relative of the parasite Giardia called monocircumanoidies.

It's eukaryotic, meaning it has organelles in a nucleus enveloping its DNA, just like our cells, or the ones in plants or fungi, but unlike bacteria, which don't have those things.

And upon closer inspection, the new critter was different from every other

eukaryot known to science, because it's missing a key organelle. It seems to have no mitochondria.

You probably learned in biology class that mitochondria, let's say it

altogether, are the powerhouses of the cell. They charge up energy-rich molecules when

oxygen's around.

But they do other stuff too, like manufacture certain essential proteins.

This newly discovered microbe and others that live in low oxygen environments use different oxygen-free pathways to make energy, but they usually

still have mitochondria for that protein assembly job.

The new bug apparently pulls off the protein synthesis by using a system that it picked up from bacteria

in what's known as a lateral gene transfer. The findings are in the journal Current biology.

Karnkovska says the microbes ancestors probably had mitochondria at some point and then lost

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