Veerke De Kock

1 INTRODUCTION Archaeal prokaryotic microorganisms have recently been repositioned as the ancestor of eukaryotes (Spang et al., 2015; Zaremba-Niedzwiedzka et al., 2017) and provide an ideal model for studying eukaryogenesis (Lewis et al., 2021).

1 Introduction Crenarchaeota lack histone-like proteins commonly found to be responsible for chromatin organization in other archaeal lineages, such as Euryarchaeota, DPANN archaea, and Asgard archaea (Sandman et al. 1990; Decanniere et al. 1996; Henneman and T. Dame 2015; Henneman et al. 2018; Stevens and Warnecke 2023). Instead, they rely on a diverse array of small proteins that function analogously to bacterial nucleoid-associated proteins (NAPs).