ArticleGeobiology2019
Early Archean origin of Photosystem II.
Article in Geobiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 60 papers.
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Who cites it
60 citing papers in PubMed, 138 citations in OpenAlex.
- The structure of intact and active Photosystem II from Arabidopsis thaliana at 2.44 Å resolution.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- The hydrogen, methane and ammonia biosphere on early Earth.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Slowing planetary rotation influences ocean nutrient cycling and oxygenation.Science advances · 2026Article
- Abundance-activity decoupling in sulfur-cycling bacteria reflects viral infection types in meromictic lakes.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- On the non-oxygenic origins of thylakoids.Communications biology · 2025Review
- Cyanobacterial redox carriers support photosynthesis in a purple phototrophic bacterium.The Biochemical journal · 2025Article
- Bioenergetics evolution: the link between Earth's and Life's history.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- A diverse Palaeoproterozoic microbial ecosystem implies early eukaryogenesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The emergence of metabolisms through Earth history and implications for biospheric evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- An early origin of oxygenic photosynthesis delays the Great Oxidation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- What the earliest evidence for life tells us about the early evolution of the biosphere.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Viral activity in lake analogs of anoxic early Earth oceans.Microbiome · 2025Article
- Predicting the diversity of photosynthetic light-harvesting using thermodynamics and machine learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Oxidative adaptations in prokaryotes imply the oxygenic photosynthesis before crown-groupPNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Widespread adaptive evolution in angiosperm photosystems provides insight into the evolution of photosystem II repair.The Plant cell · 2024Article
- Stochastic Character Mapping, Bayesian Model Selection, and Biosynthetic Pathways Shed New Light on the Evolution of Habitat Preference in Cyanobacteria.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Regulation of Microalgal Photosynthetic Electron Transfer.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- What We Are Learning from the Diverse Structures of the Homodimeric Type I Reaction Center-Photosystems of Anoxygenic Phototropic Bacteria.Biomolecules · 2024Review
- Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Photosystem II is a photochemical reaction center that catalyzes the light-driven oxidation of water to molecular oxygen. Water oxidation is the distinctive photochemical reaction that permitted the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and the eventual rise of eukaryotes. At what point during the history of life an ancestral photosystem evolved the capacity to oxidize water still remains unknown. Here, we study the evolution of the core reaction center proteins of Photosystem II using sequence and structural comparisons in combination with Bayesian relaxed molecular clocks. Our results indicate that a homodimeric photosystem with sufficient oxidizing power to split water had already appeared in the early Archean about a billion years before the most recent common ancestor of all described Cyanobacteria capable of oxygenic photosynthesis, and well before the diversification of some of the known groups of anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria. Based on a structural and functional rationale, we hypothesize that this early Archean photosystem was capable of water oxidation to oxygen and had already evolved protection mechanisms against the formation of reactive oxygen species. This would place primordial forms of oxygenic photosynthesis at a very early stage in the evolutionary history of life.
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