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Published January 2017 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Crown group Oxyphotobacteria postdate the rise of oxygen

Abstract

The rise of oxygen ca. 2.3 billion years ago (Ga) is the most distinct environmental transition in Earth history. This event was enabled by the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis in the ancestors of Cyanobacteria. However, long-standing questions concern the evolutionary timing of this metabolism, with conflicting answers spanning more than one billion years. Recently, knowledge of the Cyanobacteria phylum has expanded with the discovery of non-photosynthetic members, including a closely related sister group termed Melainabacteria, with the known oxygenic phototrophs restricted to a clade recently designated Oxyphotobacteria. By integrating genomic data from the Melainabacteria, cross-calibrated Bayesian relaxed molecular clock analyses show that crown group Oxyphotobacteria evolved ca. 2.0 billion years ago (Ga), well after the rise of atmospheric dioxygen. We further estimate the divergence between Oxyphotobacteria and Melainabacteria ca. 2.5–2.6 Ga, which—if oxygenic photosynthesis is an evolutionary synapomorphy of the Oxyphotobacteria—marks an upper limit for the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis. Together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that oxygenic photosynthesis evolved relatively close in time to the rise of oxygen.

Additional Information

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Received: 23 February 2016; Accepted: 30 May 2016; First published: 8 July 2016. We thank Dr. Itai Sharon for providing Melainabacteria 16S sequences. P.M.S. was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF 2550.04 to the Life Sciences Research Foundation and the Joint BioEnergy Institute, which is supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, through contract DE-AC02-05CH11231. N.J.M. was supported by the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, an institute sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture through NSF awards #EF-0832858 and #DBI-1300426, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. J.H. acknowledges support from the Agouron Institute and Caltech Center for Environment Microbe Interactions. L.M.W. received support from a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. W.W.F. acknowledges funding from NASA Exobiology award #NNX16AJ57G, the Agouron Institute, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. We thank Connor Skennerton, Rochelle Soo, and Phil Hugenholtz for helpful feedback on this study. We also appreciate helpful comments from Mario dos Reis and two anonymous reviewers that improved the quality of our study. The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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