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Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest colour and it might not be what you think, as it’s bright pink! Indeed, earlier this month scientists from Australian National University announced that 1.1 billion year old pigments have a bright pink hue.

Professor Jochen Brocks and his team extracted the pigment from shale rocks deep beneath the Sahara desert in Africa. On analysis they found that the pigments are molecular fossils of chlorophyll produced by tiny cyanobacteria (bacteria that produce their energy via photosynthesis) that were present in the ancient oceans. In their concentrated form, the colour varies from blood red to deep purple, and appears bright pink when diluted.

This finding of the oldest biological colour could solve a much bigger puzzle about life on Earth, giving a possible explanation as to why large, complex creatures appeared much later on in the Earth’s history, in that there weren’t food resources large enough to support larger organisms.

Given this finding on cyanobacteria and evolution we share the top three articles related to the evolution of marine microbes; our usual top three articles for the month; and our Hidden Jewels. Click on the images for full access to the recommendations.

F1000Prime is a literature recommendation service. The service has a peer-nominated global Faculty of more than 8,000 of the world’s leading biomedical scientists and clinicians who select those articles they think are particularly interesting and important, and write recommendations explaining their selection. From the numerical ratings awarded, we have created a unique system for quantifying the importance of individual articles.

Top 3 recommendations on the evolution of marine microbes

“Applications of molecular and genomic techniques have revealed amazing complexity in marine microbial communities, presenting a formidable challenge to modelers who must predict the responses of ocean ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles to climate change. This study describes a new approach that allows the model itself to determine the degree of complexity needed to describe ecological and biogeochemical interactions in the sea.” – John Cullen, Dalhousie University, Canada“The authors show that a much higher bacterial diversity resides in marine environmental samples than was previously thought, with the rarely detected low-abundance types dominating this diversity.” – Anna-Louise Reysenbach, Portland State University, USA

“This paper proposes a new approach to exploit shot-gun metagenomics data. It does not try to reconstruct whole genomes, a nearly impossible task, but instead it links gene categories and environmental conditions.” – Daniel Vaulot, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France

Current Top 3 recommendations

Rankings are generated using the article recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“In this opinion article, Khan and colleagues make the long overdue case for format-free first submissions of manuscripts to peer-reviewed scientific journals. Their estimated number of taxpayer-financed hours wasted by scientists on reformatting rejected manuscripts is daunting and, unfortunately, most likely realistic.” – Olivier Perts and Jakobus Van Unen, University of Bern, Switzerland

“During host aging, intestinal microbes undergo dramatic changes in composition and function and can shift from commensal to pathogenic. This study by Han et al., together with {1}, in nematode worms found that feeding worms with different bacterial species and with Escherichia coli mutant strains significantly tunes host life span.” – Dario Riccardo Valenzano, Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, Germany

“This article by Lemaitre presents interesting observations pertaining to narcissistic attitudes that are common and widespread in certain scholars across all of academia (although he restricts his analysis to the natural sciences). Furthermore, the author describes different venues through which narcissistic individuals can enhance their power and influence within a particular (scientific) community.” – Elena Alvarez-Buylla, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Alma Piñeyro-Nelson, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana- Unidad Xochimilco, Mexico

Hidden Jewels

Hidden Jewels rankings only include articles published in specialist journals, recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“Life is full of an inordinate amount of bureaucratic, time-wasting, energy sapping nonsense. Well-intentioned nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless, reflecting the needs and egos of those who impose them on the rest of us, whether it be the internal revenue service or universities. It’s refreshing when someone points out that the emperor not only has no clothes, but could do with a skin graft. My thanks and appreciation to the authors for pointing out this silliness.” – Neil Blumberg, University of Rochester, US

“This commentary by Bruno Lemaitre is a well-documented, very nice piece on the psychology of science. We find it funny and tragic at the same time. The author observes that top academic positions are held by high-ego individuals. Lemaitre elaborates on how these individuals reach their leading position, what this implies for their fellow scientists and how narcissism and need for power have shaped the scientific community in the past, and are still shaping it today.” – Maurizio Molinari and Ilaria Fregno, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Switzerland.

“In this study, Paul Martin and his group discovered an unexpected role for fat body cells in tissue repair. Contrary to the conventional belief that fat cells are sessile, they found them to be motile in response to wounding.” – Ronen Zaidel-Bar, Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Priti Agarwal, National University of Singapore, Singapore