Foundations for reconstructing early microbial life

TL;DR

This paper reviews current knowledge on early microbial life, emphasizing the importance of reconstructing ancient microbial innovations to understand life's evolution amid Earth's extreme environmental history.

Contribution

It introduces a new interdisciplinary approach combining microbiology and synthetic biology to reconstruct and understand early microbial life and its adaptations.

Findings

Key cellular inventions evolved early in life's history

Microbial life survived major environmental shifts

Foundations for reconstructing early microbial innovations are established

Abstract

For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an ecological revolution took place. The planet evolved from one dominated by microbial life to one containing the plants and animals that are most familiar today. The activities of many key cellular inventions evolved early in the history of life, collectively defining the nature of our biosphere and underpinning human survival. There is a critical need for a new disciplinary synthesis to reveal how microbes and their molecular systems survived ever changing global conditions over deep time. This review critically examines our current understanding of early microbial life and describes the foundations of an emerging area in microbiology and evolutionary synthetic biology to reconstruct the earliest microbial innovations.