2024-01-12 06:24:00
A scientific study published in the journal “Nature” stated that there are small fossils, which spent regarding two billion years, trapped in pieces of ancient rocks, that can provide the first evidence so far of the process of photosynthesis on Earth.
The study said, “In the McDermott Formation in the desert of northern Australia, small structures called thylakoids were discovered in what are believed to be fossilized cyanobacteria dating back to 1.75 billion years ago.”
It may seem very complicated, but it has to do with cell structures that can convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into energy and oxygen.
The study showed that the oldest fossil contained direct evidence of the structures of oxygenic photosynthesis, dating back to regarding half a billion years ago.
However, the new discovery pushes the time scale back by 1.2 billion years.
The University of Liège in Belgium stated that a group of scientists has identified the basic structures for producing oxygenated photosynthesis inside fossilized microorganisms dating back 1.75 billion years, a discovery that represents the oldest fossil evidence of this vital metabolic process.
These structures are very simple in the large scale of life on Earth now, but they were absolutely crucial to the Great Oxidation Event, an important historical period on Earth, which helped fill the atmosphere with breathable air, enabling life forms to flourish.
It is believed that the first forms of life on Earth did not need oxygen to survive, as the Earth’s primitive atmosphere consisted mainly of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor, rather than the nitrogen and oxygen that make up the current atmosphere.
About 2.4 billion years ago, there was the Great Oxidation Event, where oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere rose significantly for the first time.
Some scientists have suggested that the evolution of thylakoid membranes in early cyanobacteria provided photosynthesis with the driving force needed to trigger this event.
Cyanobacteria are known as a type of microorganism that obtains energy from the process of oxygenic photosynthesis, through which water and carbon dioxide are converted into glucose and oxygen.
As for thylakoids, they are a group of interconnected, membrane-bound structures embedded in chloroplasts, “a type of cytoplasm found in plant cells” of plants and some modern cyanobacteria.
There is still debate regarding the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis, as well as the type of cyanobacteria that participated in the early oxygenation of Earth.
In a new study recently published in the journal Nature, it was reported that traces of thylakoid membranes were discovered in microfossils known as Navifusa majensis, which were found in sedimentary rocks discovered in the McDermott Formation, in northern Australia, as well as in another sample from Canada, dating back to… To 1.01 billion years ago.
According to the study, the observations allowed the identification of Navifusa majensis as a fossil cyanobacterium.
Professor Emmanuelle Javoux, co-author of the study from the University of Liège, explained to Vice magazine that these discovered structures allow us to determine in an “unequivocal” way that the Navifusa majensis group “was actively performing early oxygenic photosynthesis 1.75 billion years ago.”
Scientists plan to search for ancient fossils and carefully study them to verify that thylakoid membranes were involved in oxygenating our planet during the Great Oxidation Event.
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