A new high resolution microbial time #tree calibrated using the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) ~2.33 billion years ago highlights the evolution of aerobic lifestyles in #bacteria. Most bacteria were ancestrally anaerobic (Bacillota/Firmicutes are the oldest) and the transition to an aerobic lifestyle was initiated by Cyanobacteria, which seeded #oxygen production and consumption capabilities to the broader bacterial tree over hundreds of millions of years.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.08.552427v1
An evolutionary timescale for Bacteria calibrated using the Great Oxidation Event
Most of life's diversity and history is microbial but it has left a meagre fossil record, greatly hindering understanding of evolution in deep time.bioRxiv
Otti Croze
in reply to James Marsh • • •Frank Aylward
in reply to Otti Croze • • •we actually published a calibrated tree of life using similar approaches recently
https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/88268v1
We received some pushback for using the GOE for calibration (all reviews and responses are public). It will be interesting to see how that plays out here.
A Timeline of Bacterial and Archaeal Diversification in the Ocean
elifesciences.orgJames Marsh
in reply to Frank Aylward • • •Frank Aylward reshared this.