Preservation of biomolecules in the fossil record of plants: state-of-the-art in Molecular Paleobotany

<b>Introduction</b> and<b> </b><b>Objective</b>. This article presents a review of literature published over the last 50 years in the area of Molecular Palaeobotany, with the aim of investigating the frequency of occurrence of biomaterials remaining in the fossil record of plants or their by-products in deep time. <b>Methodology</b> and <b>Results</b>. The results identified 53 articles describing the recovery of a broad spectrum of biomolecules, grouped into three distinct classes: labile biomacromolecules, stable biomacromolecules, and biomarkers. In general, the presence of original biochemistry composition is considered to be geologically, geographically, and taxonomically distributed in Phanerozoic rocks, with the taxonomic groups Gymnospermae and Angiospermae presenting the largest number of reports. <b>Conclusion</b>. The research corpus also reveals that the predominant techniques in the studies are microscopic (SEM, TEM) and chemical analysis, including chromatographic and spectroscopic (GC-MS, Py-GC/MS, FTIR), suggesting that as technology advances, discoveries of biomolecules associated with plant fossils should be more frequent.