19 November 2025
A New Kingdom of Life Discovered
A research team from the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague has discovered Solarion arienae, an extremely rare and morphologically unique unicellular eukaryote that sheds new light on early eukaryotic evolution. The study, published in Nature, reveals that Solarion represents a newly defined phylum and, together with a few enigmatic protist lineages, forms an entirely new eukaryotic supergroup (kingdom) named Disparia. Remarkably, Solarion preserves ancestral mitochondrial features previously thought to have long disappeared, offering an unprecedented insight into the biology of early eukaryotic cells.