The first life-forms on Earth drew energy from sunlight filtering down into the ocean depths.
Schwieterman and his colleagues began by using machine learning to look for the genes that control rhodopsin in as wide a swathe of life on Earth as possible, then identifying those genes that had the longest lineages.
And the ocean might have been one of the few safe places for early life to form, since much of the planet's surface would have been out-of-bounds to life. That's because the earlyhad no free oxygen, and hence no ozone layer to protect from harmful solar ultraviolet radiation. Instead, life would have sheltered underground or deep in the ocean, where it would be shielded from the damaging ultraviolet light.
"We resurrected ancient DNA sequences of one molecule, and it allowed us to link to the biology and environment of the past," Betul Kacar, who is an astrobiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author on the new research, said in the same statement.
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