Microbes Engineered to Model Endosymbiosis

Even if the well-known endosymbiotic theory is right, and once free-living single-celled organisms evolved to become organelles within larger cells, much remains unexplained about how, exactly, microbes came to cooperate so intimately with each other. For example, if endosymbiotic bacteria evolved to become mitochondria, they presumably lost much of their genomic content along the way. To recapitulate the genomic streamlining of endosymbiotic bacteria, and possibly other evolutionary processes,