A geological timescale for bacterial evolution and oxygen adaptation

Microbial life has dominated Earth's history but left a sparse fossil record, greatly hindering our understanding of evolution in deep time. However, bacterial metabolism has left signatures in the geochemical record, most conspicuously the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). We combine machine learning and phylogenetic reconciliation to infer ancestral bacterial transitions to aerobic lifestyles, linking them to the GOE to calibrate the bacterial time tree. Extant bacterial phyla trace their diversity to the Archaean and Proterozoic, and bacterial families prior to the Phanerozoic. We infer that most bacterial phyla were ancestrally anaerobic and adopted aerobic lifestyles after the GOE. However, in the cyanobacterial ancestor, aerobic metabolism likely predated the GOE, which may have facilitated the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.

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Publication Details

Journal
Science
Published
2025-04-04
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adp1853
Citations
37
Primary Topic
Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
29.82
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article

A geological timescale for bacterial evolution and oxygen adaptation

Lénárd L. Szánthó, Anja Spang, Edmund R. R. Moody, Gergely J. Szöllősi et al.
37 citations
Science
Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
29.82
article

A geological timescale for bacterial evolution and oxygen adaptation

Lénárd L. Szánthó, Anja Spang, Edmund R. R. Moody, Gergely J. Szöllősi, James Clark, Dominik Schrempf, Woodward W. Fischer, Ben J. Woodcroft, Davide Pisani, Rochelle M. Soo, Étienne Richy, James Hemp, Philip Hugenholtz, Bastien Boussau, Sandra Álvarez-Carretero, Adrián Davín, Philip C. J. Donoghue, Benoît Morel, Tom A. Williams, Ranjani Murali
article en
37 citations

Abstract

Microbial life has dominated Earth's history but left a sparse fossil record, greatly hindering our understanding of evolution in deep time. However, bacterial metabolism has left signatures in the geochemical record, most conspicuously the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). We combine machine learning and phylogenetic reconciliation to infer ancestral bacterial transitions to aerobic lifestyles, linking them to the GOE to calibrate the bacterial time tree. Extant bacterial phyla trace their diversity to the Archaean and Proterozoic, and bacterial families prior to the Phanerozoic. We infer that most bacterial phyla were ancestrally anaerobic and adopted aerobic lifestyles after the GOE. However, in the cyanobacterial ancestor, aerobic metabolism likely predated the GOE, which may have facilitated the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.

ScienceVol. 388(6742)
Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (FR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE), Eötvös Loránd University (HU), California Institute of Technology (US), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR), Translational Research Institute (AU), Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (JP), Queensland University of Technology (AU), The University of Queensland (AU), University of Bristol (GB), Institute for Biodiversity (DE), Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NL), HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research (HU), Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive (FR), University of Bath (GB), Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (DE)
Openalex Percentile: Top 0%
Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
29.82
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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