Ancient Light-Capturing Proteins We Rely on to See Could Help Us Find Alien Life

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Ancient Light-Capturing Proteins We Rely on to See Could Help Us Find Alien Life
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Will we discover simple life somewhere? Maybe on Enceladus or Europa in our Solar System, or further away on an exoplanet?

By tracking how rhodopsins evolved, the authors of the new paper built a family tree for the proteins. They were able to reconstruct rhodopsins from between 2.5 to 4 billion years ago.

"Decoding the complex relationships between life and the environments it inhabits is central to reconstructing the factors that determine planetary habitability over geologic timescales," the authors"Life as we know it is as much an expression of the conditions on our planet as it is of life itself.

After the GOE, the ozone layer provided protection from the Sun's UV radiation, and life evolved more modern rhodopsins that can absorb more light. So modern rhodopsins can absorb yellow and orange light along with blue and green light. "This suggests co-evolution, in that one group of organisms is exploiting light not absorbed by the other," Schwieterman."This could have been because rhodopsins developed first and screened out the green light, so chlorophylls later developed to absorb the rest. Or it could have happened the other way around."

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