By some estimates, picocyanobacteria alone are responsible for around 25% of  all photosynthesis in the ocean.

据估计，仅微微蓝细菌就承担了海洋中约 25% 的光合作用。

Could this be how picocyanobacteria originally  made the transition to life in the open oceans?

这是否就是微微蓝藻最初在公海中向生命过渡的方式？

Today, their descendants are  called picocyanobacteria, and they're the most important microbes  you've probably never heard of.

如今， 它们的后代被称为微微蓝细菌，它们是您可能从未听说过的最重要的微生物。

And while many picocyanobacteria then lost the  genes related to chitin-use, not all of them did.

虽然许多微微蓝细菌随后失去了与几丁质使用相关的基因，但并非所有细菌都丢失了。

The first clue to the chitin raft hypothesis  was something the researchers stumbled onto by accident while studying modern  picocyanobacteria in the lab.

几丁质筏假说的第一个线索是研究人员在实验室研究现代微微蓝细菌时偶然发现的。

And they found that the first  chitin-use genes appeared deep in picocyanobacteria evolution, about 500 million years ago, when their ancestors were making that  initial transition to the open oceans.

他们发现，大约 5 亿年前，第一个使用几丁质的基因出现在微微蓝藻进化的深处，当时它们的祖先正在向开放海洋进行最初的过渡。

But the story of picocyanobacteria is a reminder  that the history of microbes is also full of evolutionary odysseys, and sometimes, they're  the strangest and most hardcore of them all.

但微微蓝细菌的故事提醒我们， 微生物的历史也充满了进化的奥德赛，有时， 它们是其中最奇怪、最顽固的。