Excerpt - TSUKUBA, Ibaraki -- A mysterious marine microbe, half of whose individual cells eat algae like animals while the rest perform photosynthesis like plants, has been discovered, a University of Tsukuba research team said. The discovery, the first of its kind, will be carried in the U.S. magazine Science that will be published on Friday. "I think the discovery of the 'half-animal, half-plant' microbe shows part of the process of single-cell marine microbes evolving into plants," Prof. Isao Inoue, a member of the research team, said.
