With a new understanding of past life on the planet through fossils, a Mississippi State biological sciences faculty member is helping researchers better predict Earth’s future.
In a new article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesMatthew Brown, Donald L. Hall Professor of Biology, has uncovered a unique domain of understudied fossils: microbial eukaryotes, specifically testate amoebae from 750 million years ago. His groundbreaking research on testates will continue to help researchers understand Earth’s evolution, helping to better predict what the planet might look like millions of years from now.
“Using fossils, we can estimate the divergence periods and evolutionary paths that led to the testate amoebae found around the world today,” Brown said. “Testates are particularly important for understanding the history of the early Earth and the history of life. They represent some of the first confirmed heterotrophic eukaryotes.”
“From the data we have collected, scientists can now study the evolutionary history of these fascinating amoebae like never before using bioinformatics approaches called molecular clocks,” he continued. “During evolution, genes and the proteins they encode move like clockwork, making evolutionary changes relatively predictable and modelable.”
Brown and his co-lead author, Professor Daniel Lahr of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, collaborated with Brazilian paleontologist Luana Morais; Alfredo Porfirio-Sousa, a visiting scholar at the University of Sao Paulo; Alexander Tice, a former postdoctoral student in Brown’s lab who is on the faculty at Texas Tech University; and Quentin Blandenier, another former Brown postdoctoral student.
Today, Porfirio-Sousa and Blandenier are recognized as experts on testate amoebae in the scientific community.
Brown also thanks Nicholas Fry, Tristan Henderson, and Felicity Kleitz-Singleton, all doctoral students in his lab, for their assistance with his project.
More information:
Alfredo L. Porfirio-Sousa et al, Amoebozoan testate amoebae illuminate heterotrophic diversity and ecosystem complexity across geological time, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2319628121
Provided by Mississippi State University
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