{"id":214148,"date":"2025-05-16T14:10:39","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T19:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/light-to-electricity-nanodevice-found-in-cyanobacteria-reveals-how-early-life-utilized-sunlight-to-make-oxygen"},"modified":"2025-05-16T14:10:39","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T19:10:39","slug":"light-to-electricity-nanodevice-found-in-cyanobacteria-reveals-how-early-life-utilized-sunlight-to-make-oxygen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/light-to-electricity-nanodevice-found-in-cyanobacteria-reveals-how-early-life-utilized-sunlight-to-make-oxygen","title":{"rendered":"Light-to-electricity nanodevice found in cyanobacteria reveals how early life utilized sunlight to make oxygen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/light-to-electricity-nanodevice-found-in-cyanobacteria-reveals-how-early-life-utilized-sunlight-to-make-oxygen3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An international team of scientists have unlocked a key piece of Earth\u2019s evolutionary puzzle by decoding the structure of a light-harvesting \u201cnanodevice\u201d in one of the planet\u2019s most ancient lineages of cyanobacteria.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery, <a href=\"https:\/\/pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2427090122\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i><i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>,<\/i> provides an unprecedented glimpse into how <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/early+life\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">early life<\/a> harnessed sunlight to produce oxygen\u2014a process that transformed our planet forever.<\/p>\n<p>The team, including Dr. Tanai Cardona from Queen Mary University of London, focused on Photosystem I (PSI), a molecular complex that converts light into <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/electrical+energy\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">electrical energy<\/a>, purified from <i>Anthocerotibacter panamensis <\/i>\u2014a recently discovered species representing a lineage that diverged from all other cyanobacteria roughly 3 billion years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An international team of scientists have unlocked a key piece of Earth\u2019s evolutionary puzzle by decoding the structure of a light-harvesting \u201cnanodevice\u201d in one of the planet\u2019s most ancient lineages of cyanobacteria. The discovery, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides an unprecedented glimpse into how early life harnessed sunlight to produce [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}