Lessons from Extremophiles: Early Evolution and Border Conditions of Life

Ying Xu; Nicolas Glansdorff

doi:10.1128/9781555815813.ch28

Chapter 28 : Lessons from Extremophiles: Early Evolution and Border Conditions of Life

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Affiliations: 1: Marine Sciences Research Center, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794; 2: JM Wiame Research Institute for Microbiology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels B-1070, Belgium

Content Type: Monograph

Publication Year: 2007

Category: Applied and Industrial Microbiology; Environmental Microbiology

Book DOI: 10.1128/9781555815813

Chapter DOI: 10.1128/9781555815813.ch28

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Abstract:

Modern prokaryotes are the only forms of life featuring organisms capable of growth above 62°C, and inside each domain, the first phylogenetic analyses singled out the most extreme of these thermophiles as the earliest lines of descent: Aquificales and Thermotogales among Bacteria, different Euryarchaeota and Crenarchaeota among Archaea. A recent research study used a new algorithm automatically picking up “representative” proteins, including both ubiquitous and non-ubiquitous but rather well-conserved proteins; here Thermotoga and Aquifex remained together in a basal position with a weak bootstrap support. Modern thermophiles are the result of more than 3 billion years evolution, during which further adaptation has certainly occurred, and molecular adaptations to thermophily look rather elaborated in the only living organisms we can investigate. Temperature is an all-pervasive factor with straightforward effects on the physical state of the universal life solvent, which has to remain in the liquid state to allow suitably adapted organisms to grow. The world of extremophiles offers similar test cases; some of the most obvious ones concern extreme halophily and thermophily, conditions that impose adaptation to the whole proteome.

Citation: Xu Y, Glansdorff N. 2007. Lessons from Extremophiles: Early Evolution and Border Conditions of Life, p 409-421. In Gerday C, Glansdorff N (ed), Physiology and Biochemistry of Extremophiles. ASM Press, Washington, DC. doi: 10.1128/9781555815813.ch28

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Lessons from Extremophiles: Early Evolution and Border Conditions of Life

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Figure 1.

Alternative evolutionary scenarios for the emergence of the three domains of life from a protoeukaryotic LUCA. (A) Cells with sn-2,3 glycerol-ether lipids (Archaea) emerge by thermoreduction ( Forterre, 1995 ) from a LUCA population with sn-1,2 glycerol-ester lipids; Bacteria emerge by reductive evolution but not thermoreduction; (B) simplified alternative scheme where both sn-1,2 and sn-2,3 glycerol lipids emerge at a different time from a LUCA with precursor lipids. The figure does not specify whether the LUCA had a DNA or an RNA genome (see text and Forterre, 2005 , 2006). The “pregenomic” phase refers to concepts developed by de Duve (1991 , 2005 ) and Kauffman (1993) .

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Figure 1.

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