A geological timescale for bacterial evolution and oxygen adaptation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Davin, Adrian A.; Woodcroft, Ben J.; Soo, Rochelle M.; Morel, Benoit; Murali, Ranjani; Schrempf, Dominik; Clark, James W.; lvarez-Carretero, Sandra; Boussau, Bastien; Moody, Edmund R. R.; Szantho, Lenard L.; Richy, Etienne; Pisani, Davide; Hemp, James; Fischer, Woodward W.; Donoghue, Philip C. J.; Spang, Anja; Hugenholtz, Philip; Williams, Tom A.; Szoellosi, Gergely J.
• 署名单位: University of Queensland; Eotvos Lorand University; University of Tokyo; Queensland University of Technology (QUT); University of Queensland; Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies; Helmholtz Association; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; California Institute of Technology; Eotvos Lorand University; University of Bristol; University of Bath; VetAgro Sup; Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); University of Bristol; HUN-REN; HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research; Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology Graduate University; Utrecht University; Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ); University of Amsterdam
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-10524
• DOI: 10.1126/science.adp1853
• 发表日期: 2025-04-04
• 关键词: sulfate-reducing bacterium; lateral gene-transfer; zircon u-pb; sp nov.; molecular-clock; aerobic respiration; obligate anaerobe; shaler supergroup; black shales; TREE

摘要

Microbial life has dominated Earth's history but left a sparse fossil record, greatly hindering our understanding of evolution in deep time. However, bacterial metabolism has left signatures in the geochemical record, most conspicuously the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). We combine machine learning and phylogenetic reconciliation to infer ancestral bacterial transitions to aerobic lifestyles, linking them to the GOE to calibrate the bacterial time tree. Extant bacterial phyla trace their diversity to the Archaean and Proterozoic, and bacterial families prior to the Phanerozoic. We infer that most bacterial phyla were ancestrally anaerobic and adopted aerobic lifestyles after the GOE. However, in the cyanobacterial ancestor, aerobic metabolism likely predated the GOE, which may have facilitated the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.