When we picture monsters from the deep, most envision colossal sea beasts ready to drag the unsuspecting sailor to abyss. In actuality the sea beasts are at the other end of the size spectrum. Those viscous, nasty bacteria that line your digestive tract that could send you to your grave originated from deep-sea bacteria. A Japanese group report in PNAS that the two groups of bacteria share several genes allowing both to survive inhospitable habitats allowing them to flourish from temperatures between 39-158 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I personally love doing this series because it allows me to explore and solidify a variety of ideas I mull over on daily basis. Previously in this series I have discussed the difficulty of sampling, the variety of habitats, linkages to the oceans surface, body size, conservation, undiscovered…
Sunday evening the intelligent and lovely Sheril Kirshenbaum posited a question that I have received many times. The question is always a good one because it stems from knowledge and deductive reasoning. The said question requires one to know that one of the most extreme environmental gradients…
Since this won a Fuzzy Yeti Crab (The Fuzzy) for 2006, I thought a repost was in order.
There is a great article at the San Francisco Chronicle on cosmeuceuticals and the extent people are distributing snake oil including this beauty...
At the highest end of the skin-care spectrum, Saks Fifth…
Story by Bryan Wallace, Duke University.
UW photo by Ed Standora.
Life in the deep sea is as far removed from a source of atmospheric oxygen as there is on Earth, but a select few animals do not let their need to breathe air limit the depths of their exploration. (No, I'm not referring to intrepid…
Craig, did you seriously think I could let a broad and stereotypically libelous statement like "vicious, nasty bacteria" go by without comment? Scandelous! I could not find the paper you describe to find out what bacteria the Japanese group was looking at. However, the bacteria lining your (and everyone else's) digestive track are your friends. They help you out by synthesizing vitamins and by breaking down some polysaccharides we have no enzymes to digest ourselves. For that matter, since there are an order of magnitude more bacteria in your colon than you have cells in your body, you'd be well served remembering who is in the minority in this situation...
It's online-before-in-print, and it's open access, and the abstract (with links) is at
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0700687104v1
Deep-sea vent [epsilon]-proteobacterial genomes provide insights into emergence of pathogens.
S. Nakagawa and others.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0700687104
Hooray! for most of my gut bacteria. (Thanks, guys!)
But the authors found that some deep-sea proteobacteria are closely related to Helicobacter and Campylobacter, which are, to me and my digestive tract, decidedly vicious and nasty (although I don't know about their viscosity). The deep-sea bugs' genomes indicate they have a lot of metabolic tricks (such as multiple respiration pathways or metal-detox capabilities, and even virulence determinants) that are very close to those that the Helicos and Campys are using to be so nasty to us -- colonizing and evading host defenses and such.
Pretty cool.
And I think Craig was assuming we all know that we'd be dead without our bacterial friends in our guts.