For every living organism, Oxygen is the most important ingredient to sustaining life. 2.3 billion years ago from today, Oxygen was first produced by the Cyanobacteria with the photosynthesis process. Later this ability was evolved in all the green oxygen-producing organisms like plants and algae.
However, Cyanobacteria is one of a species which is rarely studied. For deeper understanding about the world-shaping organism, a research team from California Institute of Technology(Caltech) and the University of Queensland in Australia started analyzing its family tree. Until a couple of decades ago Cyanobacteria was known as blue-green algae, later it was revealed that they are not algae at all.
Lead researcher and geobiology professor from Caltech Woodward Fischer explained, “Oxygenic photosynthesis was an evolutionary singularity. Cyanobacteria invented it, and then ultimately become the chloroplasts of algae.” In the journal of Science, researchers described that they have added the genomes of 41 species of uncultured microorganisms and found none of them were able to carry the gene for oxygenic photosynthesis.
Phys reported, instead of emitting oxygen like plants and algae, those cyanobacteria were consuming. Researchers found only one branch of cyanobacteria named, Oxyphobacteria was only and first to evolve oxygenic photosynthesis. Melainabacteria, which is one of their closest relatives live in the guts of humans and other animals. Although, Melainabacteria losses their ability to produce oxygen over time.
Even the next most closely related cyanobacteria named, Sericytochromatia can’t engage in photosynthesis. Researchers found that 41 species are either Melainabacteria or Sericytochromatia. To re-sequence, their genome, Fischer, and his team removed the sample of DNA, and recover genomes of microbes living in that environment.
Fischer described the cyanobacteria as planetary scale engineer. Two and a half billion years ago they have invented the idea to split the water that is the most challenging chemistry on planet Earth. Scientists are planning to conduct more researches about the ecology and physiology of the new bacteria by probing them in a lab
