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The earliest microfossils, dated to be 4.28 to 3.77 Ga, were found at hydrothermal vent precipitates. These microfossils suggest that early cellular life began at deep sea hydrothermal vents. [37] Exergonic reactions at these environments could have provided free energy that promoted chemical reactions conducive to prebiotic biomolecules. [30]
The hydrothermal vents are recognized as a type of chemosynthetic based ecosystems (CBE) where primary productivity is fuelled by chemical compounds as energy sources instead of light (chemoautotrophy). [28] Hydrothermal vent communities are able to sustain such vast amounts of life because vent organisms depend on chemosynthetic bacteria for food.
The hydrothermal vent microbial community includes all unicellular organisms that live and reproduce in a chemically distinct area around hydrothermal vents. These include organisms in the microbial mat , free floating cells, or bacteria in an endosymbiotic relationship with animals.
The iron–sulfur world hypothesis is a set of proposals for the origin of life and the early evolution of life advanced in a series of articles between 1988 and 1992 by Günter Wächtershäuser, a Munich patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry, who had been encouraged and supported by philosopher Karl R. Popper to publish his ideas.
Caminibacter mediatlanticus was first isolated from a deep-sea hydrothermal vent on the Middle Atlantic Ridge. [42] It is a thermophilic chemolithoautotroph, H 2 -oxidizing marine bacteria, that uses nitrate or elemental sulfur as electron acceptors, producing ammonia or hydrogen sulfide and it cannot use oxygen, thiosulfate, sulfite, selenate ...
Plants use energy from sunlight to drive carbon dioxide fixation, but chemosynthesis can take place in the absence of sunlight (e.g., around a hydrothermal vent). Ecosystems establish in and around hydrothermal vents as the abundance of inorganic substances, namely hydrogen, are constantly being supplied via magma in pockets below the sea floor ...
[11] They show that methanogenic clostridia were basal, near the root of the phylogenetic tree, in the 355 protein lineages examined, and that the LUCA may therefore have inhabited an anaerobic hydrothermal vent setting in a geochemically active environment rich in H 2, CO 2, and iron, where ocean water interacted with hot magma beneath the ...
The development of photosynthetic energy generation enabled the microorganisms first to colonize wider areas around vents and then to use sunlight as an energy source. The role of the hydrothermal vents was now limited to supplying reduced metals into the oceans as a whole rather than being the main supporters of life in specific locations. [16]