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    Home > Biochemistry News > Biotechnology News > The earliest starch fossils were discovered 280 million years ago, and there was a complex congnito of early plants and animals.

    The earliest starch fossils were discovered 280 million years ago, and there was a complex congnito of early plants and animals.

    • Last Update: 2020-08-11
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    The importance of starch as a major food source for humans is self-evident, and the earliest known fossils of starch grains came from stone crevices from the Paleolithic period two million years ago.
    , Liu Feng, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found a strange large stone pine spore in a 280 million-year-old coal seam in Baode County, Shanxi Province, covered with a cluster of circular particles, which is thought to be the earliest starch fossil.
    , comparing it with the seeds of the living plants, thinks that this may belong to the oily structure, revealing the complex coexistence of early plants and animals.
    starch is a polysaccharide compound formed by the polymerization of glucose molecules, which are the result of the storage of carbohydrates produced by most green plants.
    as the main food source of human beings, starch plays an important role in the evolution of human physiology and civilization.
    starch particles are difficult to preserve in soil for a long time, many archaeologists believe that starch pellet fossils without stone tools or some containerprotection, it is difficult to preserve more than 600 years, the possibility of the formation before the Quaternary Period is very small.
    lack of fossil evidence, little is known about the influence of plant starch on the evolution of terrestrial ecosystem in the long geological period.
    Liu Feng research team, the University of Munster and the Institute of Geosciences and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the northeast edge of the Ordos Basin in China, Shanxi Province, Baode County, a layer of coal seam (Adensk, 29-280 million years ago) found a strange stone pine large (hexasporidium plant female ligand), the near polar surface of the spore is covered by a round particle.
    observations under optical and scanning electron microscopes show that these particles are circular or polygonal, with an umbilical depression at the center, and when viewed using an orthogonal polarizing microscope, most of the particles show a significant double refraction and cross-extinction phenomenon under the mirror (Figure 1).
    these characteristics are fully consistent with the morphological and optical properties of the present-day starch particles, the use of X-ray energy spectrum shows that these particles are mainly composed of C and O, eliminating the possibility that these particles are granules, bio-involved oxalic acid, phosphoric acid, or carbonated spherical crystals.
    a combination of evidence from microimaging and X-ray energy spectrum that show edified that these particles were starch particles dating back 290-280 million years ago.
    this is the earliest known fossil record of starch particles, breaking the presumption that some archaeologists believe starch particles are difficult to preserve in the pre-Quaternary formations without the protection of stone tools or some containers.
    further clarify that under certain sedimentary conditions, such as coal-forming environments, some starch particles that are rapidly encased and buried by soil can inhibit the hydrolysis and destruction of starch particles by water and other bacteria and fungi, so that these starches can be preserved during such a long geological period.
    at the same time, most of the starch particles found were larger than 5 microns in diameter, and they came together in a clump.
    many archaeological amyloid studies have shown that these starches should belong to compound storage starches.
    plants use photosynthesis to synthesize these starches in pigments, allowing them to play a long-term role in storing energy in plants.
    this compound storage starch is mainly distributed in the leaves and germ milk of the present seed, and is used to nourish the development of plant larvae.
    but after observation of thousands of large spores superstructure maps, it was found that these composite storage starch particles were distributed only on the surface of the near-polar surface of large spores, and did not appear similar to circular particles inside the large spores (Figure 2).
    therefore, these starch particles can basically be excluded as nutrients used to support the development of stone pine embryos.
    by comparing the starch ousates of the large spores, the researchers believe that these starchous clumps, located near the polar surface of large spores, are very close to the edible attachment of a foodie body commonly found in some of the seeds.
    the lipids of raw seeds are mainly used to attract ants, land-based grasshoppers or birds to feed seeds, thus enabling the long-distance spread of seeds.
    while spreading seeds, these animals acquire high-energy nutrients, and through this process, the animals and animals establish close co-dwellings.
    similar edible starch attachments appearon on the surface of the early second-generation spores, suggesting that long before the earliest ants and birds appeared, some ancient stone pine plants already had a strong photosynthesis capacity, and were able to store glucose produced by photosynthesis in large quantities in the form of starch, while using these starches to attract some of the organisms on land at that time (such as snails, cockroaches and polypods) to achieve their own seed spread.
    research published online in Geology, the research was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of Germany and the Humboldt Foundation of Germany.
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