Unlike shallow - water corals, which rely
on photosynthetic algae and sunlight to grow, deep - sea corals get energy from filtering organic material that falls from the surface.
Not exact matches
The work is part of a growing field called optogenetics, and used light - activated proteins from
photosynthetic algae to switch nerve cells
on and off.
After over three billion years of evolution in the oceans, multi-cellular life — beginning with green
algae, fungi, and plants (liverworts, mosses, ferns, then vascular and flowering plants)-- began adapting to land habitats by creating a new «hypersea,» and adding anomalous shades of green to Earth's coloration more than 472 million years ago (Matt Walker, BBC News, October 12, 2010; and Qiu et al, 1998 — more
on the evolution of
photosynthetic life and plants
on Earth).
Exploiting habitats that are often or mostly out of water required new symbiotic relationships to contain and move water, including the fusion of some fungi and
algae to create lichen in communities with bacteria that survive extreme desiccation
on land while breaking down rock into soil, and the association of mycorrhizae fungi and the root tissue of new vascular plants — culminating in trees that pump water high into the air — to exchange mineral nutrients (e.g., phosphorus) and usable «fixed» nitrogen from the atmosphere for
photosynthetic products.
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.
Objective: To understand the first steps in the evolution of
photosynthetic eukaryotes and the impact plastidial endosymbioses (involving cyanobacteria or unicellular
algae) had
on the genomes of these organisms that are critical to the functioning of ecosystems.