14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific study, it would appear that life experienced a surge more than 3 billion years ago. This means that the planet was only 1.5 billion years old at the time.
Experts with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted a new mathematical model, which was meant to simulate a genomic fossil of sorts. What the model does is it analyzes a variety of genes, and then calculates their most probable mechanism of evolution.
The process works by extending backwards in time. This study appears to indicate that the surge occurred at a time when the most primitive lifeforms on the planet became a lot better at harvesting sunlight, and converting it into energy to sustain grow.
In the study, the MIT group inserted about 1,000 genes into the mathematical model. The work was led by investigators Eric Alm and Lawrence David. They discovered that the collective genome of life underwent a change between 3.3 and 2.8 billion years ago.
Experts now believe that an estimated 27 percent of all gene families that exist today came into being during those 500 million years. The development of modern electron transport – a key biochemical process living things use today – may have had something to do with this, the scientists say.
This biological function enables plants and a number of microbes to conduct photosynthesis, live off sunlight, and also to produce oxygen. It functions by regulating the movement of electrons within the membranes of cells in these organisms.
Once this capability arose, the team says, the surge event occurred. This was called the Archean expansion, and it came about 500 million years before the Great Oxidation Event.
The latter is a critically-important event that took place 2.4 billion years ago, during which the Earth's atmosphere became progressively richer in oxygen. This is one of the main reasons why more complex lifeforms went on to develop beyond that time.
“Our results can't say if the development of electron transport directly caused the Archean Expansion. Nonetheless, we can speculate that having access to a much larger energy budget enabled the biosphere to host larger and more complex microbial ecosystems,” David explains.
“What is really remarkable about these findings is that they prove that the histories of very ancient events are recorded in the shared DNA of living organisms,” Alm went on to say.
“Now that we are beginning to understand how to decode that history, I have hope that we can reconstruct some of the earliest events in the evolution of life in great detail,” he concludes, quoted by Daily Galaxy.