Billions of years ago, the first eukaryotic common ancestor split from its archaeal lineage with a distinct set of genes, the majority of which many of us (eukaryotes) contain to this day. Recently, a high-throughput sequencing approach to identify the essential genes in an archaeal model organism, Sulfolobus islandicus, discovered only 80 genes conserved between present-day archaeal and eukaryotic organisms to be essential in both domains of life. Of these 80, a single has remained poorly characterized: ZPR1.
