"The process of photosynthesis is a very complex set of interdependent metabolic pathways," said Robert Blankenship, professor of biochemistry at Arizona State University. "How it could have evolved is a bit mysterious."
Photosynthesis is one of the most important chemical processes ever developed by life -- a chemical process that transforms sunlight into chemical energy, ultimately powering virtually all the living things and allowing them to dominate the earth. The evolution of aerobic photosynthesis in bacteria is also the most likely reason for the development of an oxygen-rich atmosphere that transformed the chemistry of the Earth billions of years ago, further triggering the evolution of complex life.
After decades of research, biochemists now understand that this critical biological process depends on some very elaborate and rapid chemistry involving a series of enormously large and complex molecules a set of complex molecular systems all working together.
"We know that the process evolved in bacteria, probably before 2.5 billion years ago, but the history of photosynthesis's development is very hard to trace," said Blankenship. "There's a bewildering diversity of photosynthetic microorganisms out there that use clearly related, but somewhat different processes. They have some common threads tying them together, but it has never been clear how they relate to each other and how the process of photosynthesis started, how it developed, and how we actually wind up with two photosystems working together in more complex photosynthetic organisms."
In a paper forthcoming in the November 22 issue of the journal Science, Blankenship and colleagues partially unravel this mystery through an analysis of the geno
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Contact: James Hathaway
Hathaway@asu.edu
480-965-6375
Arizona State University
21-Nov-2002