ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Illuminating the coevolution of photosynthesis and Bacteria.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary trajectory of microbial sulfur oxidation pathways recapitulates Earth's oxygenation history.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Abiotic sources of fixed nitrogen sustained early ecosystems for several hundred million years after the origin of life.Science advances · 2026Article
- An early diverging SQR enzyme in AntarcticMicrobiology spectrum · 2026Article
- Novel Raman signature evidences an unknown cyanobacterial pigment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Current Understanding of Taxonomy and Ecology of the Phylum Minisyncoccota.Microbes and environments · 2026Review
- Priority effects inhibit the repeated evolution of phototrophy.Npj complexity · 2026Article
- Exploring the Diversity and Metabolic Potential of COMicrobes and environments · 2026Article
- New chlorophylls designed by theoretical spectroscopy and machine learning.Photosynthesis research · 2025Article
- On the non-oxygenic origins of thylakoids.Communications biology · 2025Review
- 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
- 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
- Evolutionary origins of self-sustained Kai protein circadian oscillators in cyanobacteria.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Archaean green-light environments drove the evolution of cyanobacteria's light-harvesting system.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Distribution, Biosynthesis, and Function of Carotenoids in Oxygenic Phototrophic Algae.Marine drugs · 2025Review
- Microbial ecology of serpentinite-hosted ecosystems.The ISME journal · 2025Review
- Interdisciplinary investigations into the biophysics of the origins of life.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2025Article
- Incorporation of photosynthetically active algal chloroplasts in cultured mammalian cells towards photosynthesis in animals.Proceedings of the Japan Academy. Series B, Physical and biological sciences · 2024Article
- Illuminating the coevolution of photosynthesis and Bacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Life harnessing light energy transformed the relationship between biology and Earth-bringing a massive flux of organic carbon and oxidants to Earth's surface that gave way to today's organotrophy- and respiration-dominated biosphere. However, our understanding of how life drove this transition has largely relied on the geological record; much remains unresolved due to the complexity and paucity of the genetic record tied to photosynthesis. Here, through holistic phylogenetic comparison of the bacterial domain and all photosynthetic machinery (totally spanning >10,000 genomes), we identify evolutionary congruence between three independent biological systems-bacteria, (bacterio)chlorophyll-mediated light metabolism (chlorophototrophy), and carbon fixation-and uncover their intertwined history. Our analyses uniformly mapped progenitors of extant light-metabolizing machinery (reaction centers, [bacterio]chlorophyll synthases, and magnesium-chelatases) and enzymes facilitating the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle (form I RuBisCO and phosphoribulokinase) to the same ancient Terrabacteria organism near the base of the bacterial domain. These phylogenies consistently showed that extant phototrophs ultimately derived light metabolism from this bacterium, the last phototroph common ancestor (LPCA). LPCA was a non-oxygen-generating (anoxygenic) phototroph that already possessed carbon fixation and two reaction centers, a type I analogous to extant forms and a primitive type II. Analyses also indicate chlorophototrophy originated before LPCA. We further reconstructed evolution of chlorophototrophs/chlorophototrophy post-LPCA, including vertical inheritance in Terrabacteria, the rise of oxygen-generating chlorophototrophy in one descendant branch near the Great Oxidation Event, and subsequent emergence of Cyanobacteria. These collectively unveil a detailed view of the coevolution of light metabolism and Bacteria having clear congruence with the geological record.
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