lpetrich

One major difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells is that eukaryotic ones have a cytoskeleton and prokaryotic ones do not. Or so it has seemed until recent months; searches for bacterial cytoskeletons have repeatedly failed, until recently.

As described in this Nature article and this Science News article, both from last year (as I write this), some scientists have actually found a bacterial cytoskeleton -- it is a helical strand of protein embedded in the cell wall.

It serves as a scaffold for the construction of the cell wall; if it is absent, then the cell becomes spherical.

It was not seen earlier because it is buried in the cell wall, thus keeping it from being very apparent.

One of its proteins, MreB, has a shape similar to that of the eukaryote cytoskeletal protein actin, suggesting that they are related. And that the eukaryotic cytoskeleton had not come out of nowhere, but instead was an elaboration on an earlier model of cytoskeleton.

But the creationists will likely respond that one missing link has been replaced by two missing links.