Africa-Press – Mauritius. Compared to our modern planet, early Earth was an alien environment for pretty much every organism that today enjoys diverse life-sustaining energy forms. To know more about life on other planets, we might want to turn to the ancient mechanisms.
Researchers from University of California, Riverside, have discovered the way ancient organisms learned to survive on early Earth: they used a protein that helped them garner energy from sunshine when there was no oxygen.
Times like this were common on Earth before the Great Oxidation some 2.5 billion years ago. Scientists looked into proteins named rhodopsins that helped early inhabitants of our planet to capture solar energy and feed on it long before the complex process of photosynthesis became available.
There might be a lot more to early Earth lifehacks than the use of rhodopsins, according to the scientific team, and the connection between life and environment can be a perfect key to finding out more about extraterrestrial life.
Modern rhodopsins can absorb light that photosynthetic chlorophyll pigments cannot, but the latter still complements the ancient protein in a way that points to “co-evolution, in that one group of organisms is exploiting light not absorbed by the other”, according to the findings.
Which is why, the study continues, the understanding of how early organisms managed to fight for their life in conditions that may now seem alien to us might help scientists find and explore life elsewhere.
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