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Sure Earth, some organisms like it hot, some like it cold, and others only feel at home among the searing jets of acid from an underwater volcano.
The latter group – an ancient and eclectic group known as extremophiles – thrive in conditions that would kill your average Earthman. Group members tend to be on a microscopic scale, and they include tardigrades, pressure-loving prokaryotes at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the acid-absorbing bacteria that make Yellowstone Large prismatic spring so colorful.
Now, researchers exploring a deep-water volcano near New Zealand have introduced nearly 300 new, extremely living microbes to this bizarre club.
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In a study published on December 22, 2020 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, marine biologists used a remote-controlled robot to scrape sediment from a collection of hydrothermal vents 6,000 feet deep (1,800 meters) called Brother’s Volcano, located about 320 kilometers northeast of New Zealand. In a subsequent DNA analysis of volcanic sediments, the team identified 285 different types of new microbes previously unknown to science. The new extremophile transport includes 202 new potential species of bacteria and 83 species of archaea (ancient, single-celled microbes that tend to live in extreme environments).
Similar to the diversity of microbes living in Grand Prismatic Spring, different types of microbes seemed to congregate in different parts of the Brethren. Volcano, depending on the temperature and acidity of the surrounding water, the team found. Some species favored the walls of the volcano’s caldera, which is pockmarked with 20-meter-high chimneys constantly spewing out a 600-degree Fahrenheit (320-degree Celsius) fluid filled with metals. Other species preferred to swim in the sulfur gas escapes from two large mounds near the center of the caldera. (The water temperature near these mounds was a wind of 250 F or 120 C.)
In addition to adding so many new species to the tree of microbial life, these findings could give researchers another tool to study the most extreme places on Earth, the researchers wrote. Since some microbes sharing certain genetic traits appeared to thrive under specific conditions at the Brothers volcano, it follows that researchers could infer a lot about the conditions of an extreme habitat just by studying the microbes that live there.
“We’re heading to a point where microbes can be very informative about the environment they came from,” says Mircea Podar, study co-author, systems geneticist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. said in a press release. “With more data, we can use microbes as a proxy to characterize environments where traditional measurements are difficult to capture.”
Originally posted on Live Science.
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