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Molecular evidence for the early evolution of photosynthetic water oxidation

View ORCID ProfileTanai Cardona, Patricia Sánchez-Baracaldo, A. William Rutherford, Anthony Larkum
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/109447
Tanai Cardona
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK
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  • For correspondence: t.cardona@imperial.ac.uk
Patricia Sánchez-Baracaldo
2School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
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A. William Rutherford
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK
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Anthony Larkum
3University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo NSW, Australia
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Abstract

The evolution of Photosystem II changed the history of life by oxygenating the Earth’s atmosphere. However, there is currently no consensus on when and how oxygenic photosynthesis originated. Here we present a new perspective on the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis by studying the evolution of D1 and D2, the core subunits of Photosystem II, as a function of time. A Bayesian relaxed molecular clock approach was applied to the phylogeny of Type II reaction center proteins using geochemical constraints and calibrations derived from the fossil record of Cyanobacteria and photosynthetic eukaryotes. The resulting age estimates were interpreted in the context of the structure and function of photochemical reaction centers. Firstly, we point out it is likely that the ancestral protein to D1 and D2 gave rise to a photosystem that was capable of water oxidation. Secondly, our results indicate that the gene duplication event that led to the divergence of D1 and D2 is likely to have occurred more than a billion years before the emergence of the last common ancestor of extant Cyanobacteria. Thirdly, we show that it is unlikely that Cyanobacteria obtained photosynthesis via horizontal gene transfer. Furthermore, the data strongly suggest that the origin of photosynthesis in the early Archaean was necessarily followed by a rapid diversification of reaction center proteins, which included the divergence of D1 and D2. It is therefore concluded that primordial forms of water oxidation could have originated relatively soon after the emergence of photosynthesis.

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Posted February 17, 2017.
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Molecular evidence for the early evolution of photosynthetic water oxidation
Tanai Cardona, Patricia Sánchez-Baracaldo, A. William Rutherford, Anthony Larkum
bioRxiv 109447; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/109447
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Molecular evidence for the early evolution of photosynthetic water oxidation
Tanai Cardona, Patricia Sánchez-Baracaldo, A. William Rutherford, Anthony Larkum
bioRxiv 109447; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/109447

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