“Naegleria‘s pretty amazing because it can make one of these structures entirely from scratch. And it does it really fast,” Fritz-Laylin says. “It can do it in an hour to an hour and a half.”She wanted to understand how that happens. And sure enough, there are clues in the organism’s genes. She and her colleagues report in the journal Cell that this itty-bitty creature has 16,000 to 17,000 genes. Humans edge them out in gene count, but only by a few thousand.
Read more at Southern California’s Public Radio’s site.