New Methane-Eating Organisms Discovered
Understanding of methane-metabolizing organisms might have to be rethought after researchers announced discovery of two new ones. The discovery of the novel methane-metabolizing microorganisms was made using techniques that sequence DNA on a large scale and assemble these sequences into genomes using advanced computational tools. "Traditionally, these type of methane-metabolizing organisms occur within a single cluster cluster group of microorganisms called Euryarchaeota. This makes us wonder how many other types of methane-metabolizing microorganisms are out there?" asked Gene Tyson, associate professor and Deputy Head of University of Queensland's Australian Centre for Ecogenomics in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences. read more