Miraculous Microbes

Cool article:

“We have micro-organisms that live in such strong acid or base solutions that if you put your finger in, the skin would dissolve almost instantly,” Dr. Venter said in an interview. “There’s another organism that can take three million rads of radiation and not be killed.” How can a microbe withstand a blast of radioactivity that is a good 1,500 times greater than what would kill any of us virtually on the spot? “Its chromosome gets blown apart,” Dr. Venter said, “but it stitches everything back together and just starts replicating again.”

Given the wealth of biological and metabolic templates that nature has invented over nearly four billion years of evolutionary tinkering, scientists say, any sane program to synthesize new life forms must go hand in hand with a sustained sampling of the old. “My view is that we know less than 1 percent of what’s out there in the biological universe,” Dr. Venter said.

Last year, he and his colleagues went prospecting for new organisms in the deep midocean, long thought to be one of earth’s least animate regions. Sure, life evolved in the seas, but shallow seas, where sunlight can penetrate, were considered the preferred site for biodiversity. Even with the startling discovery in the 1980s of life on the ocean floor, around the hydrothermal vents, the midocean waters couldn’t shake their reputation as an impoverished piece of real estate: too far down for solar energy, too high up for its geothermal equivalent.

Yet when the Venter team began sampling the waters for the most basic evidence of life, the presence of genetic material, they found themselves practically awash in novel DNA. “From our random sequencing in the ocean, we uncovered six million new genes,” he said, genes, that is, unlike any yet seen in any of the mammals, reptiles, worms, fish, insects, fungi, microbes or narcissists that have been genetically analyzed so far. With just that first-pass act of nautical sequencing, Dr. Venter said, “we doubled the number of all genes characterized to date.”

Researchers assume that most of the novel DNA is microbial in origin, but they have yet to identify the organisms or see what they can do, because most microbes are notoriously difficult to cultivate in the lab. Bacteria may happily swim through toxic waste, but when it comes to confinement on an agar plate, thank you, they’d rather be dead.

Some music to listen to as you read.