Breakthroughs Today

If arsenic can be toxic to humans, the new strain of Halomonadaceae strives, and indeed grew, with arsenic as food. And interestingly the more arsenic scientists put up with with them, the more they grew. The GFAJ-1 strain of Halomonadaceae, a family of water-loving Gram-negative bacteria, has been isolated, and grown (cultured), from the sediments collected along the shore of Mono Lake, near Yosemite National Park, in eastern California. It thrives on arsenic or phosophorus.  What is doubly interesting here is that GFAJ-1 does not only consume arsenic, it directly incorporate the toxic element into their genetic material (DNA). "We know some microbes can 'breathe' arsenic. But what we've found is a microbe doing something new--building parts of itself out of arsenic," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who headed the research team. (Read more .) (photo by Wikimedia) 

Using more than 200 samples collected from 17 deepwater sites between May 25 and June 2, scientists led by Terry Hazen reported on 24 August 2010 that they found a dominant microbe in the oil plume which turned out to be a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales . It thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit). Scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory noticed this suddenly flourishing bacteria at the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Although still unknown and unnamed, the microbe consumed oil droplets found underwater without significantly depleting oxygen in the water. Oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67 percent, while that within the plume was still 59 percent. Oil-eating microbes that consume large amounts of oxygen in the water can potentially create a "dead zone," an area where no oxygen was available, which is dangerous to other life underwater. (Photo by Associated