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Abstract

Author summary Mitochondria are nearly ubiquitous components of eukaryotic cells that constitute bodies of animals, fungi, plants, algae, and a broad diversity of single-celled eukaryotes, a.k.a. protists. Many groups of protists have substantially reduced the complexity of their mitochondria because they live in oxygen-poor environments, so they are unable to utilize the most salient feature of mitochondria–their ATP-producing oxidative phosphorylation metabolism. However, for a long time, scientists thought that it is impossible to completely lose a mitochondrion because this organelle provides other essential services to the cell, e.g. synthesis of protein cofactors called iron-sulfur clusters. Detailed investigation of the chinchilla symbiont M. exilis documented the first case of an organism without mitochondrion, and it also provided a scenario explaining how this unique evolutionary experiment might have happened. In this work, we expand on this discovery by exploring genomes of multiple relatives of M. exilis. We show that the loss of the mitochondrion is not limited to a single species but possibly extends to its entire group, the oxymonads. We also compare the predicted metabolic capabilities of oxymonads to their closest known mitochondrion-containing relatives and map out various changes that occurred during the transition to amitochondriality.