ArticleScience advances2021
Cellular remains in a ~3.42-billion-year-old subseafloor hydrothermal environment.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The role of theFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis-GC-MS and supervised machine learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Prebiotic Interconversion of Pyruvate and Lactate over Zeolite-Supported Ni Catalyst.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Timing the evolution of phosphorus-cycling enzymes through geological time using phylogenomics.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Opinion: The Key Steps in the Origin of Life to the Formation of the Eukaryotic Cell.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Inorganic Fe-O and Fe-S oxidoreductases: paradigms for prebiotic chemistry and the evolution of enzymatic activity in biology.Frontiers in chemistry · 2024Review
- Novel complete methanogenic pathways in longitudinal genomic study of monogastric age-associated archaea.Animal microbiome · 2023Article
- Detection, Diagnosis, and Preventive Management of the Bacterial Plant PathogenPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
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- Biogeochemical fingerprinting of magnetotactic bacterial magnetite.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Varied solutions to multicellularity: The biophysical and evolutionary consequences of diverse intercellular bonds.Biophysics reviews · 2022Review
- On the Photostability of Cyanuric Acid and Its Candidature as a Prebiotic Nucleobase.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The darkest microbiome-a post-human biosphere.Microbial biotechnology · 2022Article
- Editorial: Ecology, Metabolism and Evolution of Archaea-Perspectives From Proceedings of the International Workshop on Geo-Omics of Archaea.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Subsurface habitats on Earth host an extensive extant biosphere and likely provided one of Earth's earliest microbial habitats. Although the site of life's emergence continues to be debated, evidence of early life provides insights into its early evolution and metabolic affinity. Here, we present the discovery of exceptionally well-preserved, ~3.42-billion-year-old putative filamentous microfossils that inhabited a paleo-subseafloor hydrothermal vein system of the Barberton greenstone belt in South Africa. The filaments colonized the walls of conduits created by low-temperature hydrothermal fluid. Combined with their morphological and chemical characteristics as investigated over a range of scales, they can be considered the oldest methanogens and/or methanotrophs that thrived in an ultramafic volcanic substrate.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.