A Lost World Discovered in Rocks Billion Years ago

Tech 2023-06-09 09:08:42 Source: Network

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, June 8 (Reporter Zhang Mengran) A study published by Nature magazine on the 7th reported a new class of steroids found in ancient rocks and confirmed the long prehistoric history of complex Eukaryote. The discovery of this "lost world" also confirmed the prediction of Nobel Prize winner Konrad Emil Bloch about the existence of primary steroid molecules

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, June 8 (Reporter Zhang Mengran) A study published by Nature magazine on the 7th reported a new class of steroids found in ancient rocks and confirmed the long prehistoric history of complex Eukaryote. The discovery of this "lost world" also confirmed the prediction of Nobel Prize winner Konrad Emil Bloch about the existence of primary steroid molecules.

Eukaryote are thought to have existed for 2 billion years. Fossils of such organisms are rare, so researchers can only look for molecular fossils - such as steroid metabolites left on rocks by Eukaryote. However, the difficulty of searching for such fossils is significant.

A team of Australian National University scientists believe that these biomarkers have been there all along, but in a different form than previously anticipated. They reported the molecules called protosteroids found in Mesoproterozoic sedimentary rock this time, which confirmed that early eukaryotes had an ecological advantage in the aquatic environment at least 1.6 billion to 800 million years ago.

German biochemist Konrad Emil Bloch first predicted the existence of such molecules in 1994. He proposed that in the long biosynthetic pathway from wool sterols to cholesterol, each transient intermediate was a fully adapted final product hundreds of millions of years ago, and each of these products is an evolutionary progression based on its precursor. But his conclusion is that these intermediate primitive molecules will never be found, because they cannot survive in the Geologic record. New research suggests that this is not the case, as traces of native steroids can remain in rocks for over 1 billion years.

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These ancient creatures, dreamily beautiful as illustrations from science fiction stories, may never have "reappeared" in the world without the power of steroids. The potential of primary steroids as biomarkers of life has always been ignored. These lipid molecules are extremely rich in History of Earth, and they are absolutely capable of reducing the unknown stories in the evolution process and the protagonists in the stories. Now, by searching for steroid fossils in ancient rocks, scientists have taken us a glimpse of a distant and wonderful corner of the world.

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