Buried microbes exist at limit between life and death

Buried microbes exist at limit between life and death



Here's a fascinating article on the extent of life on Earth! Microbes found in the deepest parts of the North Pacific ocean "gyre" are at the very limit of an environment for sustaining life - these cells may take thousands of years to divide, may in fact be many thousands of years old, in clay 30 meters beneath the seafloor that was deposited there 86 million years ago.

What keeps them alive? Their research suggest the time scale these microbes exist is so slow that to us they appear dead;

Røy thinks the microbial community is so sparse, and the metabolic rates so low, that the nutrient levels probably represent the bare minimum required to keep cellular enzymes and DNA working. "It looks like we have reached the absolute lower limit for the metabolism of cells," he says.

[...] when Morono's team treated the cells to what he calls a "luxury meal" of glucose and other nutrients, most of them incorporated some food – suggesting that they are, in fact, alive. "Their lives are just very slow compared with ours," he says

Because of their remarkably slow metabolic rates, individual cells may have extremely long life spans, says Røy. The cells Morono's team examined looked intact, yet it would take each of them hundreds or thousands of years to generate enough energy to go through cell division and produce daughter cells. That means some of Morono's cells could be thousands of years old.

If we ever wonder where life on Earth would spring anew from, in the event a mass-extinction level cataclysm should occur, it's these buried and remote repositories of microbes and cells that might one day become the springboard for renewing life on the planet, even if it would take hundreds of millions, if not billions of years to do so.


Article from Newscientist.com
PS: loved the intro to the article: "Look and learn, sloths;" Science reporting with attitude!

Great find!

Sounds like they found they key to suspended animation, imagine hibernation chambers for space travel. Slowing the metabolism to such a rate could do wonders for longevity.

Hi science fans.

The subject makes me think about "wheat seeds" they did find in Egypt?
around 3000 to 4500 years OLD ?

They planted them, and they WORKED. . .they DID grow ! !

What makes me think/wonder, is that they are completely dry ! NO WATER !
Nature is strong, to "revive stuff" like this, thousands of years later, only
because we add a little moisture !! B-)

Blue skies.

10,000 years to accumulate the energy needed for their cells to divide...

they live in a near-zero energy state, but from what i could tell in the source, they revive when presented with energy/food? These could easily be the next lurking building blocks of life, if everything on the surface gets wiped out by a meteor or comet. Nice to know life on planet Earth has such a backup system in place!

Originally posted by ADVISOR
Great find!

Sounds like they found they key to suspended animation, imagine hibernation chambers for space travel. Slowing the metabolism to such a rate could do wonders for longevity.

Exact same thought crossed my mind upon reading it.

A starting block into researching suspended animation.

But maybe our present form is merely a "hibernation" of our actual form and we're in some type of suspended animation already but we just don't realize it.... hmmmmm
I'm bored, have to think of something to entertain myself