Sentences with phrase «by photosynthetic cyanobacteria»

The team presents new isotopic data showing that a burst of oxygen production by photosynthetic cyanobacteria temporarily increased oxygen concentrations in Earth's atmosphere.

Not exact matches

But with our planet as their guide, astrobiologists are forced to acknowledge that oxygen may be the least likely thing they will ever see — genetic evidence suggests the complex oxygen - producing photosynthetic pathway pioneered by cyanobacteria is an extraordinary evolutionary innovation that only appeared once throughout the entire multi-billion-year history of Earth's biosphere.

«Our lab and others have put a gene from cyanobacteria into crop plants and found that it boosts the photosynthetic rate by 30 percent,» he said.

On the other hand, many anaerobic microbes including methanogens are easily poisoned by oxygen, and the recent discovery of banded sediments with rusted iron on Akilia Island in West Greenland suggests that oxygen - producing, photosynthetic microbes (e.g., cyanobacteria) living on the surface of wet areas to gather sunlight may have developed by the end of this geologic period (3.85 billion years ago) despite continuing bombardment from space.

Given at least nine meters (roughly 30 feet) of water on the planet, photosynthetic microbes (including mats of algae, cyanobacteria, and other photosynthetic bacteria) and plant - like protoctists (such as floating seaweed or kelp forests attached to the seafloor) could be protected from «planet - scalding» ultraviolet flares produced by young red dwarf stars, according to Victoria Meadows of Caltech, principal investigator at the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

As proposed by Andrew Goldsworthy in 1987, cyanobacteria and later chloroplast - related protists and plants developed after microbes that used a purple pigment bacteriorhodopsin that absorbs green light dominated the oceans, and so the new photosynthetic cyanobacteria were forced to use the left - over light with chlorophyll that reflects green light, which was too complex to change even after purple - reflecting photosynthetic lifeforms were no longer dominant (Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist, September 10, 2010 — more on the evolution of photosynthetic life and plants on Earth).

Regardless of when the cyanobacteria appeared, it is widely accepted that they comprised the predominant form of life on early earth for some two billion years, and were responsible for the creation of earth's atmospheric oxygen, consuming CO2 and releasing O2 by photosynthetic metabolism.

It does contain a modicum of truth, however, in that the largest volume of stromatolitic formations was likely formed by biogenic processes involving photosynthetic cyanobacteria.