Living in sub-zero brine

Murray et al. 2012. Microbial life at −13 °C in the brine of an ice-sealed Antarctic lake. PNAS

Lake Vida is in the Antartic, how's this for a place to live:

• sits at -13 deg C
• salt concentrations 6 times that of sea water
• sits under 50-100 ft of ice
• aphotic (little or no light penetrates)
• anoxic (no oxygen)

(taken from Nature journal's website here)

As always though, microbes abound - albeit ~10-fold lower concentrations than lakes, and a lot more tiny cells that normal. Now that doesn't mean the diversity is high - in the survey they found ~32 species in 8 different phyla - but c'mon, give any microbes credit for living down there!

The researchers cored deep, viewed the cells via fluorescent staining and microscopy, and coupled that with rRNA gene sequence analysis.

Link to the original article: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/21/1208607109

Link to more general article: http://www.nature.com/news/life-abounds-in-antarctic-lake-sealed-under-ice-1.11884

Looking for treasure trove of ancient microbes

Lake Vostok is a giant freshwater lake that is entombed beneath 2 miles of ice. It is estimated that this body of water has been sealed off for ~10 million years. Scientists have been drilling for a long time in hopes of reaching the water and to then be able to sample it.

What would they expect to find? Microbes would be the primary form. What would microbes that hadn't intermingled with other microbes in millions of years look like? That's the magic question. My guess is that there will be some really amazing things that come from this and that it will related to environmental metagenomic analysis

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/world/europe/russian-scientists-bore-into-ancient-antarctic-lake.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/lake-vostok-microbes-unlikely-life_n_1264605.html (this article diverges quickly but for current students I like how it alludes to the extremophiles)

An interesting side note - the world's coldest recorded temperature was at Vostok - minus 128.6 degrees. They had to try to do most of this work in the "summer" when flight into the site was possible