Surviving one of Earth’s most extreme environments

Friday, December 14, 2018 - 15:50 in Earth & Climate

Even in Earth’s most inhospitable environments, life has taken hold. Extremophiles are the organisms most well-known for withstanding extreme temperatures, pHs, salinity, and even nutrient-starvation. They have evolved special mechanisms that enable them to survive in their environments, but getting to the bottom of that resilience requires targeted and methodical interrogation. At Yellowstone National Park and similar sites, extremophiles reside in environments such as acid hot springs or thermal acid soils. Here they are exposed, often intermittently, to some of the lowest naturally-occurring pHs on Earth, and temperatures nearing the boiling point of water. To survive in these rapidly fluctuating conditions, organisms protect themselves with complex membranes, composed of interlocked lipids linked to their backbones with strong ether bonds, rather than the ester bonds most commonly found in eukaryotes and bacteria. In Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, an archaeon that lives in high-acid, high-temperature environments that are common in Yellowstone, cellular membrane lipids called glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (GDGTs) are...

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