Primordial Steroids Solve Long-Standing Mystery About How the First Complex Life-Forms Evolved

The article describes a new discovery of ancient steroids in rocks that are 1.6 billion years old. These steroids are produced by eukaryotic organisms, which are cells with nuclei and membrane-bound organelles. Eukaryotes include plants, animals and fungi, and they are more complex than prokaryotes, which are cells without nuclei and organelles. Eukaryotes are thought to have evolved at least 2 billion years ago, but their fossil record is very scarce. One of the problems is that the steroids that eukaryotes make as part of their cell membranes are not found in rocks older than 800 million years. This raises the question of how the earliest eukaryotes made their membranes and what they looked like.

The researchers solved this mystery by looking for different kinds of steroids that are precursors to the modern ones. These precursors are produced by earlier steps in the eukaryotic metabolism and they reflect a more primitive form of eukaryotes. The researchers found these precursors in sedimentary rocks from different parts of the world that date back to between 1 billion and 1.6 billion years ago. This means that eukaryotes were more abundant and diverse than previously thought, and that they could live in open marine habitats. The researchers suggest that these primordial eukaryotes were a transitional stage between prokaryotes and modern eukaryotes, and that their discovery will help understand the evolution of complex life on Earth.

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