On Earth, some organisms like it to be hot, others like it to be cold, and others only feel at home among the burning acid rays of an underwater volcano.
The latter group – an ancient and eclectic bunch known as extremophiles – thrive in conditions that will kill your average earthling. Members of the group tend to be microscopic of scale, and it contains radiation resistant tardigrades, pressure-loving prokaryotes at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the acid-swallowing bacteria that make Yellowstone’s Great Prismatic Spring so colorful.
Now, researchers investigating a deep-sea volcano near New Zealand have incorporated nearly 300 new extreme living microbes into the 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 1,800-meter-deep hydrothermal vents called Brother’s Volcano, located about 320 kilometers northeast of New Zealand. In a subsequent DNA analysis of the volcanic sediment, the team identified 285 different species of new microbes that were previously unknown to science. The new extremophile trait contains 202 potential new species bacteria and 83 species of archaea (old unicellular microbes that tend to live in extreme environments).
Similar to the diverse group of microbes that exist in the Grand Prismatic Spring, different types of microbes seemed to congregate on different parts of the brothers. Volcano, depending on the temperature and acidity of the surrounding water, the team found. Certain species favor the walls of the volcano’s caldera, which are filled with 20-meter chimneys that have continuously filled 600 degrees Fahrenheit (320 degrees Celsius) with metal. Other species prefer to swim through the country sulfur gases leaking from two large heaps near the center of the caldera. (The water temperature near the hills was 120 ° C).
In addition to adding so many new species to the tree of microbial life, researchers could provide another tool to study the most extreme places on earth, the researchers wrote. Since certain microbes that share certain genetic traits thrive in specific conditions in Brothers Volcano, it follows that researchers were able to deduce much about the conditions of an extreme habitat by studying only the microbes that live there.
“We’re heading to a point where microbes can be very informative about the environment they came from,” studied co-author Mircea Podar, a systems geneticist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. said in a statement. “With more data, we can use microbes as a proxy to characterize environments where traditional measurements are difficult to capture.”
Originally published on Live Science.