When Did Photosynthesis Emerge on Earth?

By D. D. Marais. Science, 2000

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Life began early in Earth9s history, but it was the emergence of photosynthesis that allowed its proliferation across the planet, because it freed life from its sole dependence on abiotic chemical sources of reducing power. Des Marais discusses recent geological and molecular biological evidence, such as the paper by Xiong et al., that photosynthesis emerged at least 2,800 million years ago.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7222efb9303fb592b62c6d0bd059aedf53e32b5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. C. Dupraz
2. Olivier Braissant
3. A. Decho
4. R. Norman
5. H. Ledford
6. J. Johnson
7. R. Reid
8. Aomawa L. Shields

In Global and Planetary Change

1. H. Ledford
2. David C. Catling
3. Giada N. Arney
4. F. Dayan
5. V. Meadows
6. K. Niyogi
7. M. L. M. Zaccaro

In Oceanography

1. C. Dupraz
2. Olivier Braissant
3. P. Visscher
4. A. Decho
5. H. Ledford
6. F. Dayan
7. K. Niyogi
8. M. L. M. Zaccaro

Citations in the corpus

• Biogeochemical modelling of the rise in atmospheric oxygen (2006, background): “…ubiquity of the substrate (CO2, H2O and photons), oxygenic photosynthesizers probably radiated quickly and became dominant players in the planetary ecosystem (Des Marais, 2000), as they are today, limited only by the availability of trace nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen (Tyrell, 1999).”
• Singlet oxygen and photo‐oxidative stress management in plants and algae (2005, background): “Through over 2 billion years of fine-tuning (Des Marais 2000), oxygenic photosynthetic organisms have developed a panoply of protective mechanisms both to prevent the formation of ROS and to detoxify ROS once they have Photo-oxidative stress management 1039 © 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Plant,…”
• The natural history of nitrogen fixation. (2004, background): “Despite the abundance of available sequence data from whole genomes, the evolution and distribution of nitrogen fixation in cyanobacteria remains enigmatic and will require more information—genomic, biochemical, and physiological— to unravel.”
• Processes of carbonate precipitation in modern microbial mats (2009, background): “…(Des Marais, 1995; Farmer, 2000) by “inventing” the process of oxygenic photosynthesis through cyanobacterial activity (Kasting, 1991; Holland, 1994; Des Marais, 2000; Kasting and Howard, 2006), fixing N2, and producing vast amounts of hydrogen, which was lost to space (Hoehler et al., 2001).”
• Chlorophyll fluorescence as a marker for herbicide mechanisms of action (2012, background): “Photosynthesis, which consists primarily in converting light energy into chemical energy while using CO2 and releasing O2, is an energy resource 3–4 orders of magnitude larger than previous processes [2].”
• Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Review of Remotely Detectable Signs of Life (2017, background): “Initial calculations suggest that these types of communities might be two to three orders of magnitude less productive (with less surface biomass generated) than modern oxygenic ones (Des Marais, 2000; Kharecha et al., 2005), possibly making their detection on exoplanets more difficult.”
• The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars (2016, background): “A prevailing theory connects the origin of photosynthesis to the evolution of organisms from a dependence on deep-water hydrothermal vent environments to an adaptation to shallower waters, where the harvesting of solar energy was possible (Nisbet et al., 1995; Nisbet & Fowler, 1999; Des Marais, 2000”