bacterial intelligence: extremophiles everywhere (Animals)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 30, 2017, 15:31 (2733 days ago) @ David Turell

Archaean bacteria are from the oldest life and they can live anywhere, metabolize anything as this study on salt-loving, methane producing type shows:

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49525/title/Researchers-Discover-...

"Many strains of archaea are capable of living in environments with high salt concentrations, and others are able to produce methane, but only a few can do both. In a study published today (May 26) in Nature Microbiology, researchers identified and cultured two lineages of methane-generating archaea that thrive in salty lakes. The two strains—part of a class the authors named “Methanonatronarchaeia”—appear to be most closely related to the Halobacteria, a class of archaea found in salt-rich environments worldwide.
 
“'The halophilic archaea had long been suspected to have evolved from a lineage of methanogens, and this new lineage is the missing link confirming this hypothesis,” William Whitman, a microbiologist at the University of Georgia who did not participate in the study, wrote in an email to The Scientist. “This work is of great value and an important development.” 

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"To culture the strains successfully, the team grew them at high salt concentrations and temperatures and added a form of iron sulfide, a mineral that is found in the sediments where these microbes grow.

"The researchers observed the production of methane in the cultures only when they provided both formate and methanol or trimethylamine, two substrate combinations used in the methyl-reducing pathway of methanogenesis. They concluded that the two archaeal lineages likely use this pathway instead of three alternative methanogenesis pathways commonly used by other archaea.

"The authors compared representative genomes of the two lineages to each other, as well as to the genomes of other archaea. These comparisons suggested that the common ancestor of archaea was a methane-producer, a hypothesis that others have explored as well. They also found genomic evidence that this class of archaea copes with high salt concentrations by transporting potassium ions into their cells, rather than by excluding salt, behavior that is more similar to halophilic archaea than to other methanogens.

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"Sorokin explained that another open question is how the organisms use iron sulfide, since it doesn’t appear to get into their cells. But the future direction that most interests him is understanding how this class of archaea functions in the environment.
“The main question now is how they compete,” Sorokin said. In sediment incubation experiments, the team found that “as soon as the conditions are right, [these organisms] immediately jump to domination of 90 percent of the community, but of course how it goes on in the native setting, I still don’t know,” he explained.

“'We know that there are many ancient lineages in the prokaryotic world that have never been cultured and haven’t been fully explored,” said Whitman. “This is a good example of how studying these lineages provides much more detail about the early evolution of life.'” (my bold)

Comment: From the start of life, which we do not understand, these ancient bacteria forged forward into every complex and difficult environment, altering their metabolic processes to fit each problem. Note the bold above. How did they gain the ability to be so inventive when the two other common branches of bacteria did not? Not by chance.