Oxygen played a key role in the evolution of complex organisms, according to new research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study shows that the complexity of life forms increased earlier than was thought, and in parallel with the availability of oxygen as an energy source.
In the largest study to date that does not focus on vertebrates, researchers from Pennsylvania State University used molecular dating methods to create a new timeline of eukaryotic evolution. By adding information about the numbers of different cell types possessed by each group of organisms, the researchers reconstructed how the complexity of life has increased over time. The study shows that organisms containing more varied cell types evolved following increases in atmospheric oxygen.
Professor Blair Hedges, who led the research team said: “To build a complex multicellular organism, with all the communication and signalling between cells it entails, you need energy. With no oxygen or mitochondria, complex organisms couldn’t get enough of this energy to develop.”
The study showed that organisms containing more than two or three different cell types appeared soon after the surface environment became oxygenated around 2,300 million years ago. This was around the same time that cells became able to extract the energy from oxygen, thanks to the emergence of mitochondria.
Life forms became even more complex following the evolution of organelles able to produce oxygen. Plastids, such as chloroplasts found in plants, evolved around 1,500 million years ago. During the following 500 million years, organisms that contained up to 50 different cell types evolved. These more complex organisms included algae, which would have benefited directly from being able to produce their own oxygen, and early animals and fungi, which could use this extra oxygen to provide energy for their development.
The authors of the study write: “The results support a deep history for complex multicellular eukaryotes, and implicate oxygen as a possible trigger for the rise in complex life.”
To calculate when the different groups of organisms diverged, the researchers compared the sequences of nuclear proteins from a wide range of different organisms using all the available molecular dating methods. All the methods gave similar results.
The pattern and timing of the rise of complex multicellular life during the history of the Earth has not been firmly established. There are large differences between the history suggested by the fossil record, and that estimated using DNA and protein sequence data.
Molecular dating has some obvious advantages over the fossils, however. Hedges said: “This type of information is very difficult to obtain from the fossil record of early life. However the genomes of organisms are packed with millions of bits of data that biologists are now beginning to decipher, and some of those data can be used to tell time.”
This press release is based on the following article:
A molecular timescale of eukaryote evolution and the rise of complex multicellular life
Blair Hedges, Jaime E Blair, Venturi Maria and Jason L Shoe
BMC Evolutionary Biology, 2004 4:2
Published 27 January, 2004
When published, this article will be available online free of charge, according to BMC Evolutionary Biology’s Open Access policy. View the article at:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/4/2/abstract
For further information about this research please contact Professor Blair Hedges by email at sbh1@psu.edu or by phone on 814-865-9991
Alternatively, or for further information about the journal or Open Access publishing, please contact Gemma Bradley by email at press@biomedcentral.com or by phone on 44-207-323-0323.
BMC Evolutionary Biology (http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcevolbiol/) is published by BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com), an independent online publishing house committed to providing Open Access to peer-reviewed biological and medical research. This commitment is based on the view that immediate free access to research and the ability to freely archive and reuse published information is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. BioMed Central currently publishes over 100 journals across biology and medicine. In addition to open-access original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews, commentaries and other non-original-research content. Depending on the policies of the individual journal, this content may be open access or provided only to subscribers.
