Who came first? The egg or the chicken? Scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) believe they have found the answer to this age-old question. According to them, it is the egg. The researchers reached this conclusion by looking at a single-celled organism called “Chromosphaera perkinsii”, discovered in marine sediments near Hawaii in 2017. It has been present on Earth for more than a billion years, “well before the appearance of the first animals”.
However, the scientific team led by Omaya Dudin, assistant professor of biochemistry at the Faculty of Science, observed that this species formed multicellular structures during its growth similar to those of animal embryos. This suggests that the genetic programs responsible for embryonic development – through which the fertilized egg is transformed – were present before the emergence of animal life. In other words, “nature would have had the genetic tools to “create eggs” well before having “invented chickens,” summarizes a press release. The study was published in the journal “Nature”.
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