1. Konstantin Mereschkowski presented this theory in 1910, in his work, The Theory of Two Plasms as the Basis of Symbiogenesis, a New Study of the Origins of Organisms, although the fundamentals of the idea had already appeared in his earlier 1905 work, The nature and origins of chromatophores in the plant kingdom.
Konstantin Mereschkowski's mother Varvara Vasilyevna was a daughter of a senior Saint Petersburg security official, and was fond of arts and literature.
Konstantin Mereschkowski worked in California as a botanist at Los Angeles and University of California, Berkeley, devising a new system of classification of the diatoms based on the internal structures of the specimens in his Black Sea collection.
Konstantin Mereschkowski had earlier escaped Saint Petersburg in 1886 and the Crimea in 1898 for fear of being prosecuted for similar crimes.
Konstantin Mereschkowski was dismissed from Kazan University, and escaped to France.
Konstantin Mereschkowski actively assisted the far-right Black Hundredist organisation the Kazan Department of the Union of Russian People, and provided secret assistance to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in hunting down Jews and supposed traitors.
Konstantin Mereschkowski's work was influenced by the French botanist Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper who had noted that chloroplasts resembled cyanobacteria.
Around the turn of the century, Konstantin Mereschkowski formed a sizeable lichen herbarium, containing over 2000 specimens collected from Russia, Austria and around the Mediterranean.
Konstantin Mereschkowski rejected Darwinian evolution, believing that natural selection could not explain biological novelty.
Konstantin Mereschkowski argued instead that the acquisition and inheritance of microbes was central.
Konstantin Mereschkowski was criticised and even ridiculed by other biologists, such as the Polish lichenologist Alexandr Alexandrovich Elenkin.
Species named after Konstantin Mereschkowski include Plowrightia mereschkowskyi, Physcia mereschkowskii, and Caloplaca mereschkowskiana.