What did the first "plant" on Earth look like, capable of photosynthesis, that is, of producing sugar and oxygen using sunlight? A team of scientists, led by Dana Price and her colleagues at Rutgers University (USA), believe they have solved the mystery. As published in the journal Science , and echoed by the Sinc agency, around 1,600 million years ago a protist microorganism captured a prokaryotic cyanobacterium. From this process, known as primary endosymbiosis, the plastid arose, a cellular organelle where photosynthesis takes place and which today is present in plants and algae. In their article, the researchers provide evidence describing how all plastids could descend from a single primary endosymbiosis process.
To obtain these conclusions, the team of experts analyzed the DNA contained in the plastids of a primitive alga known as Cyanophora paradoxa , and compared it with the genomes of plastids belonging to other terrestrial plants and to different red and green algae. The species C.paraxa belongs to the group of glaucophytic algae that, together with red and green algae and plants, constitute the first group of photosynthetic eukaryotes that, according to the research, inhabited the planet and formed the plant kingdom. 21 universities and research centers from the USA, Korea, Canada, Germany, Austria and France have collaborated in the research.
