SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
The First Oxygen Users?
from ScienceNOW Daily News
None of us would be here today if, billions of years ago, a tiny, single-celled organism hadn't started using oxygen to make a living. Researchers don't know exactly when this happened, or why, but a team of scientists has come closer than ever before to finding out. They've identified the earliest known example of aerobic metabolism, the process of using oxygen as fuel. The discovery may even provide clues as to where the oxygen came from in the first place.
To travel so far back in time, evolutionary bioinformaticist Gustavo Caetano-Anollés of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, along with colleagues in China and South Korea, did a bit of molecular sleuthing.
They scoured published genomes from all groups of organisms--although they didn't include viruses in this study--focusing on pieces of proteins known as domains. These pieces have their own distinguishing shapes that provide clues to the protein's function and can be categorized based on various characteristics. Just like a Victorian house has certain features that set it apart from a Tudor mansion, researchers can tell the difference between different domains based on their shape.
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