Discoveries in Bacterial Evolution
Researchers from OIST and international collaborators have built a timeline of bacterial evolution, highlighting how some bacteria adapted to oxygen long before the (GOE) 2.3 billion years ago.
Utilizing ancient sediments, rocks, and a combination of genomic data, geological markers, and machine learning, the team identified at least three bacterial lineages that had aerobic lifestyles before the GOE, challenging previous assumptions of a solely anaerobic existence prior to this event.
Implications and Methodology
The study suggests that the ability to use trace amounts of oxygen may have facilitated the evolution of cyanobacteria's oxygenic photosynthesis, ultimately contributing to the atmospheric changes during the GOE.
By integrating genomic, fossil, and chemical data, and employing Bayesian statistics and machine-learning techniques, the researchers have created a model that offers a new level of resolution to the study of evolution in deep time, potentially applicable to other microbial traits.