Bacteria Used Oxygen Billions of Years Before Photosynthesis, Study Suggests

A multinational team of scientists has created a detailed timeline of bacterial evolution, revealing that some bacteria utilized oxygen nearly a billion years before the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), which made Earth's atmosphere breathable. By combining genomic data, fossil evidence, and geochemical records, and employing machine learning to predict ancestral bacterial function, the researchers found evidence of aerobic metabolism predating the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis. This groundbreaking research not only reshapes our understanding of bacterial evolution but also opens avenues for predicting other bacterial traits, such as antibiotic resistance.