Life’s building blocks in Loki’s Castle under the Atlantic

Deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, between Greenland and Norway, scientists have found micro-organisms they call a missing link connecting the simple cells that first populated Earth to the complex cellular life that emerged roughly 2bn years ago.

The researchers said a group of micro-organisms called Lokiarchaeota, or Loki for short, were retrieved from the inhospitable, frigid seabed about 2.35km under the ocean surface not too far from a hydrothermal vent system called Loki’s Castle, named after the Norse mythological figure.

The discovery provides insight into how larger, complex cell types that are the building blocks for fungi, plants, and animals including people, a group called eukaryotes, evolved from small, simple microbes, they said.