Latest Hyperthermophile Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Although some have estimated a third of the Earth's biomass lives in our planet's rocks and sediments, little is known about these hard to reach organisms. A new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), with possibly wide reaching implications, looks to study one group of methane-producing microbes that live deep in the cracks of hot undersea volcanoes. Because of the alien nature of these...

Many manufacturing processes rely on microorganisms to perform tricky chemical transformations or make substances from simple starting materials. The authors of a study appearing in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, on April 17 have found a way to control a heat-loving microbe with a temperature switch: it makes a product at low temperatures but not at high temperatures. The innovation could make it easier to use microorganisms as miniature...

Prospecting for new and unusual cellulose-digesting enzymes for biofuels productionBy Robert Sanders, UC BerkeleyBioprospectors from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland School of Medicine have found a microbe in a Nevada hot spring that happily eats plant material "“ cellulose "“ at temperatures near the boiling point of water.In fact, the microbe's cellulose-digesting enzyme, called a cellulase, is most active at a record 109 degrees Celsius (228...