With support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Simons Foundation, UC Santa Barbara paleobiologist Susannah Porter, and UC Santa Barbara professor Alyson Santoro will deploy their expertise and their research teams in efforts to shed light onto the origins of the eukaryotic cell.

The origins of the eukaryotic cell have been the subject of conjecture for decades.

Santoro is developing a method to detect archaeal cells in environmental samples, select for certain characteristics and sort them for genomic sequencing, in a collaboration with colleagues from Oxford University, the Heimholtz Institute and the University of Texas.

The findings that come from these and the other studies in the Moore-Simons project could go a long way toward understanding the many mysteries that surround the origin of the eukaryotic cell.