Reacción a "A Spanish study published in Nature reimagines the origin of our cells as a story of microbial alliances"

The potential contribution of NCLDV to LECA from Asgards is the most compelling aspect of the study to me. Although, we have not yet seen NCDVs that infect Asgards, or any archaea for that matter, I think there’s a lot to learn there. 

In my view one big shortcoming of the study is that the findings seem to be skewed by a lack of representation in the databases being used. For example, they use GTDB from 2022 for the genomic sampling of prokaryotes. This is an issue in that the number of Asgard genomes has more than doubled in the last year alone, see Appler et al Nature 2026, which has a expansion of Asgards from Heimdall, which are closely related to eukaryotes.