AS HISTORICAL events go, it was one of the most important in the last few billion years. The development of photosynthesis - the biological capture of light energy from the sun - underpins almost all complex life on Earth, but what organism first did it, and how, has been a mystery.
Now it seems that that honour goes to the ancestors of cyanobacteria, a huge phylum of filamentous bacteria found all over the world. Armen Mulkidjanian of the University of Osnabrück in Germany and his colleagues analysed the genomes of 15 species of cyanobacteria and discovered that the photosynthetic machinery they use appears to pre-date that of all other phototrophic bacteria.
Aside from cyanobacteria, there are four other phyla of bacteria that photosynthesise, and each does so with a variety of different genes. Mulkidjanian's team discovered that only cyanobacteria possess all 100 of these genes - including many that are ...
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