cyanobacteria

Scientists discover unique microbe in California's largest lake

...nt relativethat last shared a common ancestor with cyanobacteria more than twobillion years ago.The small subunit ribosomal RNA gene is widely used by scientists toinfer the relationships among living organisms, in part because it isgenerally assumed that it is faithfully transmitted from parent tooffspring. Howev...

Family trees of ancient bacteria reveal evolutionary moves

...al eras ?approximately 2.1 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria first arose on the Earth. This was a time when the Earth's atmosphere had an incredible, mysterious and inexplicable rise in oxygen, from extremely low levels to 10 percent of what it is today. There were three ?some say four ?global glaciations, and...

Robot-based system developed at Carnegie Mellon detects life in Chile's Atacama desert

...tects signals from chlorophyll-based life, such as cyanobacteria in lichens, and fluorescent signals from a set of dyes designed to light up only when they bind to one of the following ?nucleic acid, protein, lipid or carbohydrate ?all molecules of life. "We don't know of other remote methods capable both of dete...

Anammox bacteria produce nitrogen gas in oceans' snackbar

... be taken up anymore by other organisms. Algae and cyanobacteria only partly succeed in fixing the released nitrogen gas to form new nutrients that can be fed into the nutrient cycle again. In the article in PNAS, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Bremen, Germany) and the Institut...

Scientists find viruses can't stick to sea bugs in the dark

...able atmosphere relies on millions and millions of cyanobacteria in the seas absorbing the sun's light and giving o... "Research using cyanophages to control blooms of cyanobacteria must take light into consideration," explains Ying Jia. Algal blooms can use up the oxygen in water ...

Evidence of 600-million-year old fungi-algae symbiosis discovered in marine fossils

...ants began to massively colonize the land. But did cyanobacteria or other algae form similar relationships with fun...ts interpret the coccoidal cells as being sheathed cyanobacteria or possibly green algae. "The filaments have reproductive characteristics that make us think they ar...

Freeze-dried mats of microbes awaken in Antarctic streambed

...raphs, coupled with carbon isotope analyses of the cyanobacteria that measured variation in atmospheric carbon over...roductivity, she said. As photosynthetic bacteria, cyanobacteria are believed by biologists to be among the first living organisms to colonize Earth. The mats genera...

Hot-spring bacteria flip a metabolic switch

...rs and oxygen via photosynthesis. In fact, ancient cyanobacteria produced most of the oxygen that allows animals to... where different organisms split up the work, with cyanobacteria serving as the main photosynthetic power plants. Microbial mats in Yellowstone National Park's Octop...

Williams College biologist explores photosynthetic apparatus

...e advantages in the capacity for photosynthesis of cyanobacteria under certain environmental conditions. She will also examine the molecular responses and mechanisms triggered by changes in environmental factors, such as light and temperature. It is critical in the context of potential global climate changes to un...