3 ms·

Isn’t this absence of ligninase theory generally considered incorrect? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/a

Isn’t this absence of ligninase theory generally considered incorrect? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/

scotty79 3y ago
This article itself states that this is the widely accepted explanation before attempting to question it: "A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated." So this theory is generally considered correct with some people thinking it might not be.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Yes, that paper is not very convincing. Because we know for sure that more plants have been fossilized without being decomposed, it is certain that either the plants were growing faster or after death they were decomposed slower or there were some phenomena that caused the frequent burial of the dead plants before being decomposed. The last cause is implausible as an explanation for something that had a duration of more than one hundred million years and which never happened later. Maybe the plants were growing faster, due to a higher content of carbon dioxide in the air, but that is not enough for a quantitative explanation, especially because if efficient decomposers had existed, their population size would have increased to match the available food. The decomposition must also have been much slower than today. So there is little doubt that the wood was decomposed much slower than today. What is much less certain, and this is the only part of this research paper that may be correct, is that lignin was the culprit. Perhaps the fungi of Carboniferous and Permian already had all the digestive enzymes of today, but all of them were less optimized than the modern enzymes, so the wood decomposition speed was lower than today.

Isn’t this absence of ligninase theory generally considered incorrect? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/

scotty79 3y ago

This article itself states that this is the widely accepted explanation before attempting to question it: "A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated." So this theory is generally considered correct with some people thinking it might not be.

adrian_b 3y ago
Yes, that paper is not very convincing. Because we know for sure that more plants have been fossilized without being decomposed, it is certain that either the plants were growing faster or after death they were decomposed slower or there were some phenomena that caused the frequent burial of the dead plants before being decomposed. The last cause is implausible as an explanation for something that had a duration of more than one hundred million years and which never happened later. Maybe the plants were growing faster, due to a higher content of carbon dioxide in the air, but that is not enough for a quantitative explanation, especially because if efficient decomposers had existed, their population size would have increased to match the available food. The decomposition must also have been much slower than today. So there is little doubt that the wood was decomposed much slower than today. What is much less certain, and this is the only part of this research paper that may be correct, is that lignin was the culprit. Perhaps the fungi of Carboniferous and Permian already had all the digestive enzymes of today, but all of them were less optimized than the modern enzymes, so the wood decomposition speed was lower than today.