Tracking Down the First Oxygen Users

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tracking Down the First Oxygen Users

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @06:45AM from the primordial-home-health-care dept.

sciencehabit writes "None of us would be here today if, billions of years ago, a tiny, single-celled organism hadn't started using oxygen to make a living. Researchers don't know exactly when this happened, or why, but a team of scientists has come closer than ever before to finding out. They've identified the earliest known example of aerobic metabolism, the process of using oxygen as fuel. The discovery may even provide clues as to where the oxygen came from in the first place."

5 of 109 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Oxidizer, not fuel by Un+pobre+guey · 2012-01-11 06:49 · Score: 5, Informative

Oxygen is not the fuel. It is the oxidant to the fuel to release energy.
1. Re:Oxidizer, not fuel by Aguazul · 2012-01-11 06:56 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  In a hydrocarbon atmosphere, you can burn oxygen. All our definitions are oriented around our oxygen-based atmosphere. I'm sure we'd call oxygen 'fuel' if we lived in a hydrocarbon atmosphere and oxygen was the scarcer material.
2. Re:Oxidizer, not fuel by Samantha+Wright · 2012-01-11 08:15 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Oxygen is the most aggressively electronegative element after Fluorine. (I think that Neon might be even more aggressive if you could ionize it usefully.) I had a colourful mnemonic for this in second-year organic chemistry that revolved around bitches and gimps, but the take-home message is that Chlorine robs Nitrogen, and Oxygen wipes out everything but good ol' Fluorine. For related reasons, fluorine becomes a source of face-melting death in hydrogen-bonded form.
  
  --
  Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Re:Where the oxygen came from... by SJHillman · 2012-01-11 06:53 · Score: 5, Informative

We already know the guys who produced the oxygen (or at least we have a good idea), we're interested in the ones who used it.
Re:Where the oxygen came from... by turbidostato · 2012-01-11 07:32 · Score: 5, Informative

"My understanding ... is that atmospheric oxygen at levels high enough to sustain oxygen based metabolism came from plants and trees"
Your understanding is quite wrong.
By the time there were "plants and trees" the major part of the biosphere already was oxigen dependant.
The change of the atmosphere from reductive to oxidative predates trees by about two billion years -the start of the proterozoic age is marked about 2.4 billion years ago (with a strong spike around the precambric which still predates trees by about 300 million years).