Most modern eukaryotes rely on fat-like compounds called sterols, such as cholesterol, to build cell membranes and carry out other cellular functions.

大多数现代真核生物依靠似脂肪的醇化合物（如胆醇）来构建细胞膜并执行其他细胞。

They maybe hard to make sterol, which is important for medical uses and they tend to be weak.

它们可很难制造甾醇，这对医疗用途很重要，而且它们往往很弱。

This absence has led to speculation that before 800 million years ago, eukaryotes were not abundant enough to leave a detectable sterol trace.

这种乏导致了一种猜测，即在8亿年前之前，真核生物并不足以留下可检测到的醇痕迹。

Because sterols are found throughout the eukaryotic family tree, they are thought to have been present in the last common ancestor of all modern eukaryotes.

由醇在真核生物系谱中随处可见，因此人们认为它们存在所有现代真核生物的最后一个共同祖先中。

That would suggest that modern sterols — not just their precursors — should also be present in rocks that are more than 800 million years old.

这表明现代醇——不仅仅是它们的前身——也应该存在超过8亿年历史的岩石中。

One possibility is that eukaryotes that make more-modern sterols gained a selective advantage between one billion and 800 million years ago, eventually displacing their protosterol-making counterparts.

可的一种可性是，在10亿到8亿年前，制造现代醇的真核生物获得了选择性优势，最终取代了它们制造原始醇的同。

Benjamin Nettersheim, a geobiologist at the University of Bremen in Germany, Jochen Brocks, a palaeobiogeochemist at the Australian National University in Canberra, and their colleagues decided to focus on short-lived molecules that modern eukaryotes make while synthesizing sterols.

德国不莱梅大的地球生物家本杰明·内特谢姆、澳大利亚国立大堪培拉分校的古生物地球化家约翰·布洛克斯及其同事决定将重点放在现代真核生物合成醇时产生的短寿命分子上。