A little squid sheds light on evolution with bacteria

Date:  January 7, 2019

Source:  University of Connecticut

Bacteria, which are vital for the health of all animals, also played a major role in the evolution of animals and their tissues. In an effort to understand just how animals co-evolved with bacteria over time, researchers have turned to the Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes.

In a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers, led by UConn associate professor of molecular and cell biology Spencer Nyholm, sequenced the genome of this little squid to identify unique evolutionary footprints in symbiotic organs, yielding clues about how organs that house bacteria are especially suited for this partnership.

The first squid genome was sequenced by Nyholm, along with Jamie Foster of the University of Florida, Oleg Simakov of the University of Vienna, and Mahdi Belcaid of the University of Hawaii. The team found several surprises, for instance, that the Hawaiian bobtail squid's genome is 1.5 times the size of the human genome.

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Without 46 million year-old bacteria, turtle ants would need more bite and less armor

March 6, 2018, Drexel University

You've probably heard about poop pills, the latest way for humans to get benevolent bacteria into their guts. But it seems that a group of ants may have been the original poop pill pioneers—46 million years ago.

A new collaborative study, published in Nature Communications, determined that turtle ants (Cephalotes) are able to supplement their low-nitrogen diets by passing helpful bacteria from older ants to younger ones through anal secretions. Once this is done, the now-internalized microbes (tiny bacteria) naturally produce the nitrogen necessary for turtle ants to survive.

"Turtle ants eat a lot of food that is hard to digest and contains few essential nutrients in accessible form," said Jacob Russell, PhD, an associate professor in Drexel University's College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's senior author. "The fact that they can subsist on such diets and have moved away from aggressively competing for more optimal food resources with other ants is almost certainly a function of their investment in symbioses with gut bacteria."

Carried out by researchers at Drexel, the University of California San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, The Rockefeller University, Calvin College, and the Field Museum of Natural History, this multi-institution, international study was spearheaded by Yi Hu, PhD, while finishing a postdoc at Drexel, and Jon Sanders, PhD, a postdoc at UC San Diego.

The study was inspired by work Russell did with Carrie Moreau, PhD, and Naomi Pierce, PhD, in Pierce's lab more than a decade ago when they discovered that many ants with low-quality diets harbored specialized bacterial symbionts - likely to supplement their diets.

Read more at:

Monitoring bacteria on whale skin

Humpback microbiome linked to seasonal, environmental changes

Date:  February 14, 2018
Source:  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Summary:
Just like with humans, the skin on marine mammals serves as an important line of defense against pathogens in their environment. A new study sheds light on the skin microbiome -- a group of microorganisms that live on skin -- in healthy humpback whales, which could aid in future efforts to monitor their health.

Read more  

New light shed on antibiotics produced by ants

Date:  February 7, 2018

Source:  North Carolina State University

Summary:

Ants, like humans, deal with disease. To deal with the bacteria that cause some of these diseases, some ants produce their own antibiotics. A new comparative study identified some ant species that make use of powerful antimicrobial agents -- but found that 40 percent of ant species tested didn't appear to produce antibiotics. The study has applications regarding the search for new antibiotics that can be used in humans.

Continued  

Harmful bacteria (Brucella) discovered in both amphibians and mammals

March 30, 201, Phys.org

In the U.S. alone, Brucella infections cause economic losses on the order of $30 million per year due to dead livestock, infected milk, and general health care costs. In countries that rely heavily on agricultural products, it presents an even greater threat.

Once thought to affect mainly humans and livestock, Brucella is now being found in species scientists never expected. Previously unknown strains of the bacteria were recently discovered in frogs.

Scientists in the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech's PATRIC group are examining genetic sequences of Brucella from these amphibian isolates and comparing them to more well-known mammalian strains.

Their findings, recently published in Scientific Reports, revealed that amphibian Brucella strains show distinctive characteristics not seen in other forms—the most surprising development being a whip-like flagellum that helps the bacteria move through their environment. These discoveries are radically changing how we think of disease and the transfer of bacteria between organisms.

"Since the 1850s, we had the idea of Brucella bacteria as having strong preferences for particular hosts," said Rebecca Wattam, research assistant professor at the Biocomplexity Institute. "Now, we know that these bacteria are much more diverse than we'd previously thought. Our view of the Brucella world is expanding dramatically.”

The strains of Brucella found in African bullfrogs were cultured and found to be able to live in mammalian hosts for up to 12 weeks, suggesting that new types of brucellosis infections may be headed our way. In fact, there have been two recent cases where previously unseen strains of Brucella were found in a human host.

 

Though these discoveries present significant cause for concern, new strains of Brucella and other pathogens might help scientists to better understand how microorganisms evolve and transfer their genetic material.

Metagenomic analysis makes finding these new strains of bacteria possible. Instead of culturing strains in a lab and sequencing their genomes, scientists are able to extract samples for analysis from entirely new sources. The ability to isolate DNA from sources like soil is likely to speed up the discovery of new organisms, providing us with what might be our first real glimpse into the diversity of microbiota.

"It's a great time to be a biologist, especially with metagenomic analysis," Wattam said. "We know some things really well, but we now have the tools to explore what we never imagined. In light of all this new information, we definitely need new ways of looking at bacteria and how we live with them."

More information: Sascha Al Dahouk et al. Brucella spp. of amphibians comprise genomically diverse motile strains competent for replication in macrophages and survival in mammalian hosts, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/srep44420 

Journal reference: Scientific Reports

Provided by: Virginia Tech

Bad breath: Study find array of bacteria when orcas exhale

March 24, 2017 by Phuong Le 
 

In this Jan. 18, 2014, file photo, a female orca leaps from the water while breaching in Puget Sound west of Seattle, as seen from a federal research vessel that has been tracking the whale. Using unique breath samples captured over four …more

When the mighty orca breaks to the surface and exhales, the whale sprays an array of bacteria and fungi in its his breath, scientists said, some good, and some bad such as salmonella.

The findings in a new study raises concerns about the potential role of infectious diseases as another major stress factor for the struggling population of endangered Puget Sound orcas.

Those orcas' breath samples revealed microbes capable of causing diseases. Some were resistant to multiple antibiotics frequently used by people and animals, suggesting human waste contaminating the marine environment, according to a study published online Friday in the journal Scientific Reports.

Scientists followed the whales as they swam in Washington state waters and waited for them to surface and exhale. The researchers on boats would swing a 25-foot long pole with several petri dishes above an orca's blowhole, capturing the droplets that sprayed out.

Using those unique breath samples captured over a four-year period, the study identifies an array of bacteria and fungi contained in the exhaled breath of the small, distinct population of southern resident killer whales of the northeast Pacific Ocean.

The number of Puget Sound orcas has fluctuated in recent decades as they have faced threats from lack of prey, pollution and noise disturbance from vessels. The orcas were listed as endangered in 2005, and now number 78.

Scientists also found healthy bacteria in the breath samples but also worrisome drug-resistant ones such as salmonella and Staphylococcus aureus.

The whales swim through urbanized waterways and encounter a number of environmental stressors caused by humans, including everything from what gets flushed down toilets to agricultural runoff.

"They're recruiting the bacteria in their habitats," said Stephen Raverty, the study's lead author who is a veterinary pathologist with British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Health Centre in Abbotsford.

Read more at: 

How did ‘harmless’ bacteria kill thousands of antelopes?

by Chuck Bednar

Ordinarily harmless microbes are being blamed for the recent mass deaths of between 120,000 and 200,000 antelope in recent months, but the exact reason why these bacteria suddenly became virulent has scientists puzzled, according to recently-published media reports.

At one point, more than 60,000 of a critically endangered type of antelope known as saigas were killed by the bacteria in Kazakhstan over a four-day span, Live Science explained. Those saigas were all part of a single herd, the website said, and as veterinarians and conservationists worked to help those antelope, they heard reports similar population crashes all over the countries.

Geoecologist Steffen Zuther, international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science “at first we were not really alarmed” since there had been limited die-offs over the past few years – but that changed when more and more of the creatures started to succumb to the pathogens. The “extent” and “speed” of the diet off is “unheard of,” he said.

According to the Daily Mail, scientists believe that the bacteria, which normally live harmlessly in the animals’ bodies, have wiped up as much as 80 percent of the saiga antelope populations in Kazakhstan in a matter of weeks. Tissue samples taken from the carcasses of the creatures show that the microbes somehow caused extensive bleeding in many of their organs.

Read more at

Geckos resistant to antibiotics, may pose risk to pet owners, study finds

Date:

May 14, 2015

Source:

University of Georgia

Summary:

Tokay geckos harbor bacteria that are resistant to a number of antibiotics, making them a health concern for pet owners, according to a study on geckos imported from Indonesia. The research focused on how the geckos respond to antibiotics; the study found that the bacteria from the geckos' intestines--known as enteric bacteria--were resistant to the antibiotics.

Read more ...

Bacteria inhibit bat-killing fungus, could combat white-nose syndrome

Date:

April 8, 2015

Source:

University of California - Santa Cruz

Summary:

Bacteria found naturally on some bats may prove useful in controlling the deadly fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome, which has devastated bat populations throughout eastern North America and continues to spread across the continent. Scientists isolated bacteria that strongly inhibited the growth of the white-nose syndrome fungus in laboratory tests.

Continued ...

Testing biological treatment for pathogens that are killing honeybees and bats

Date:

June 19, 2014

Source:

Georgia State University

Summary:

A researcher is studying a new, biological treatment for bacterial and fungal pathogens that are killing honeybees and bats in record numbers. He is testing how effective Rhodococcus rhodochrous, a species of bacteria, is in fighting pathogens affecting honeybees and bats.

Continued

Dogs Bring Swarm of Bacteria Into Your Home

Your loyal pooch may be bringing a whole world of bacteria into your home — but don't panic. Research suggests that exposure to a wide variety of microbes may be good for us.

A new study reveals that homes with dogs have greater bacterial diversity than canine-free dwellings. Dog-related diversity is particularly high on television screens and pillowcases, the researchers found.

"When you bring a dog into your house, you are not just bringing a dog, you are also introducing a suite of dog-associated [microbe] taxa directly into your home environment, some of which may have direct or indirect effects on human health," the researchers wrote today (May 22) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Microbes around us

The microbes in our environment are the subject of increased interest by scientists, thanks to studies revealing how intertwined human lives are with those of the single-celled. Skin microbes, for example, may be key for warding off disease. And the load of microbes living in the human gut may influence everything from immunity to obesity.

North Carolina State University biologist Rob Dunn and his colleagues wanted to step back from the body to better understand the microbes in our environment at large. They gave 40 families a home-sampling kit and asked them to swab down nine locations in their houses: a kitchen cutting board, a kitchen counter, a refrigerator shelf, a toilet seat, a pillowcase, a television screen, the main door's exterior handle and the upper trim on both an interior door and on an exterior door. The researchers then examined the microbial DNA from the swabs to detect different families of microscopic tenants living on these surfaces.

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Honeybees Harbor Antibiotic-Resistance Genes

ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2012) — Bacteria in the guts of honeybees are highly resistant to the antibiotic tetracycline, probably as a result of decades of preventive antibiotic use in domesticated hives. Researchers from Yale University identified eight different tetracycline resistance genes among U.S. honeybees that were exposed to the antibiotic, but the genes were largely absent in bees from countries where such antibiotic use is banned.

The study appears on October 30 inmBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

"It [resistance] seems to be everywhere in the U.S.," says Nancy Moran of Yale University, a senior author on the study. "There's a pattern here, where the U.S. has these genes and the others don't."

Honeybees the world over are susceptible to the bacterial disease called "foulbrood," which can wipe out a hive faster than beekeepers can react to the infection. In the U.S., beekeepers have kept the disease at bay with regular preventive applications of the antibiotic oxytetracycline, a compound that closely resembles tetracycline, which is commonly used in humans. Oxytetracycline has been in use among beekeepers since the 1950s, and many genes that confer resistance to oxytetracycline also confer resistance to tetracycline.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030062405.htm

Researchers Discover Bacteria That Produces Pure Gold

The gold you see in the photo above was not found in a river or a mine. It was produced by a bacteria that, according to researchers at Michigan State University, can survive in extreme toxic environments and create 24-karat gold nuggets. Pure gold.

Maybe this critter can save us all from the global economic crisis?

Of course not—but at least it can make Kazem Kashefi—assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics—and Adam Brown—associate professor of electronic art and intermedia—a bit rich, if only for the show they have put together.

Kashefi and Brown are the ones who have created this compact laboratory that uses the bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans to turn gold chlroride—a toxic chemical liquid you can find in nature—into 99.9% pure gold.

Continued:  http://gizmodo.com/5948739/researchers-discover-bacteria-that-can-produce-pure-gold

Microbes Help Hyenas Communicate Via Scent

ScienceDaily (Aug. 30, 2012) — Bacteria in hyenas' scent glands may be the key controllers of communication.

The results, featured in the current issue of Scientific Reports, show a clear relationship between the diversity of hyena clans and the distinct microbial communities that reside in their scent glands, said Kevin Theis, the paper's lead author and Michigan State University postdoctoral researcher.

"A critical component of every animal's behavioral repertoire is an effective communication system," said Theis, who co-authored the study with Kay Holekamp, MSU zoologist. "It is possible that without their bacteria, many animals couldn't 'say' much at all."

This is the first time that scientists have shown that different social groups of mammals possess different odor-producing bacterial communities. These communities produce unique chemical signatures, and the hyenas can distinguish among them by using their noses.

Past research has demonstrated important roles played by microbes in digestion and other bodily functions. It's also widely known that most mammals use scent to signal a wide range of traits, including sex, age, reproductive status and group membership. This study details bacteria living in a mutually beneficial relationship with their hyena hosts. It also highlights the contribution of new DNA sequencing technologies showcasing the role good, symbiotic bacteria play in animal behavior.


Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120830152337.htm

Jurassic Park in a Petri dish: Scientists bring 500 million-year-old bacteria back to life - what could possibly go wrong?

A 500 million-year-old bacteria has been brought back to life in a laboratory at Georgia Tech in an experiment with echoes of Jurassic Park's disastrous recreation of the dinosaurs. 

The researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene and inserted it into a modern E Coli bacteria.

The 'Frankenstein' germ has thrived. In the lab, the creation has now lived through 1,000 generations. 

The scientists hope to find out whether the 'ancient' bacteria will evolve the same way it did 'first time round' - or whether it will evolve into a different, new organism.

‘This is as close as we can get to rewinding and replaying the molecular tape of life,’ said scientist Betül Kaçar, a NASA astrobiology postdoctoral fellow in Georgia Tech. 

The new 'chimeric' bacteria has mutated rapidly - and some have become stronger and healthier than today's germs. 

‘The ability to observe an ancient gene in a modern organism as it evolves within a modern cell allows us to see whether the evolutionary trajectory once taken will repeat itself or whether a life will adapt following a different path.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2172406/Jurassic-Park-Petri-dish-Scientists-recreate-500-million-year-old-bacteria-lab--possibly-wrong.html#ixzz20h7IykZw

UNLV researchers fight disease affecting honeybees

Two scientists who work in a lab down a maze of hallways in a building at the edge of UNLV's campus are on the verge of stopping the human race from starving to death.

They will say that's an exaggeration. That they and the university will not, in fact, make a billion dollars off their discovery. That they're just furthering the cause of science.

Except, it might not be an exaggeration at all.

A third of all the food we eat was pollinated by honeybees. That includes most fruits, nuts and vegetables.

A million honeybees are trucked into California every year just to pollinate crops. A study by Cornell University estimated the value of the country's honeybee pollination industry at $19 billion a year.

So, basically, we'd all be dead if it weren't for the honeybee.

Which means a disease that's wiping out honeybees is bad. Really bad.

If someone discovers something that will stop that disease, that someone is saving all human life as we know it.

Meet professor Penny Amy and graduate student Diane Yost.

These two say things like, "We've isolated 31 isolates of the virus," and they use words like "pathogen" and "bacteriophage," so we're going to paraphrase a whole bunch here.

Amy has been at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for 26 years. She's a microbiologist who specializes in how microbes interact with the environment. Microbes are bacteria, viruses and other tiny organisms.

Yost is a 24-year-old student from Las Vegas who switched majors and latched onto environmental microbiology.

A couple of years ago, the professor heard a presentation on the topic of honeybees. The pathogen American foulbrood disease came up.

Amy had not heard of that.

AFB has been known about for 100 years. It is called "American" because this is where it was first discovered, but the disease is worldwide. It is the worst of the bacterial diseases that affect honey­bees.

It is a bacteria that simply exists in nature. Sometimes, honeybees encounter it while out running their errands. When they return to the hive, they sometimes accidentally bring it with them.

That is how it works its way into honeybee colonies. It does not harm adult bees, but when the larvae - the babies - get infected, the bacteria settles into their gut and eats them from the inside out.

It is gross and it is deadly.

Needless to say, a beehive that can't produce viable babies is a beehive that won't last very long.

AFB can live in spores that settle on bee equipment for 40 years or more. If a hive gets infected, the most common solution is to burn everything. That's how dangerous it is.

If this thing started taking out beehive after beehive, circling the planet like a monster in a Hollywood blockbuster?

Well, let us not think about that.

Let us think about science instead.

When professor Amy started thinking about AFB, she thought about how some scientists have figured out ways to kill some bacteria with viruses.

This has been going on for decades, but it's really taken off in recent years as researchers look for ways to kill so-called "superbugs," or bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics.

So anyway, Amy did some more research. She wrote a grant proposal. She got it, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

She recruited some grad students, including Yost.

The two started collecting samples from nature, trying to find viruses in things related to bees.

They tested soil from Pennsylvania and Iowa; beeswax, that gluey stuff bees make to hold their hives together; even a tube of Burt's Bees lip balm that Yost found while walking her dog in a park. In all, they tested 98 different things.

Turns out, they found naturally occurring strains of a virus in 31 of the samples (including, yes, the lip balm). None of those virus strains hurt humans - or, more importantly, adult honeybees.

They ran some tests. They figured out that some of those strains actually did kill the AFB bacteria.

They presented the results of their research last month to the American Society for Microbiology.

They're in the process right now of running DNA testing to figure out which strains are which.

Once they figure that out, they'll want to weaponize the stuff. They wouldn't use that term, of course, but that is the goal. They want to figure out whether they can make it into a spray or something that would essentially treat infected beehives or, even better, protect beehives from ever getting infected.

If they could do that, they would stop once and for all a terrible disease that's infecting bees all over the planet.

They could patent their discovery jointly with the university.

And everyone would walk away, satisfied that they've saved the planet, done good science, and made off with a billion dollars.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.

http://www.lvrj.com/news/unlv-researchers-fight-disease-affecting-honeybees-161759595.html

Feral Pigs Can Carry Nasty Bacteria That Can Be Transmitted to People

ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2012) — A North Carolina State University study shows that, for the first time since testing began several years ago, feral pigs in North Carolina have tested positive for Brucella suis, an important and harmful bacteria that can be transmitted to people.

The bacteria are transmitted to humans by unsafe butchering and consumption of undercooked meat. Clinical signs of brucellosis, the disease caused by the bacteria, in people are fairly non-specific and include persistent flu-like symptoms. The bacteria can also spread in pig populations, causing abortions in affected swine.

In a study conducted to test N.C. feral pig populations for several types of bacteria and viruses, about 9 percent of feral pigs studied in Johnston County and less than 1 percent of feral pigs surveyed randomly at 13 other sites across the state showed exposure to B. suis.

Dr. Chris DePerno, associate professor of forestry and environmental resources at NC State and the corresponding author of a paper describing the research, says the results are troubling for people who hunt feral pigs for sport or food.

Read on:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120411131913.htm

Mars Viking Robots 'Found Life'

Mathematical analysis adds to growing body of work questioning the negative results of a life-detection experiment 36 years ago.

THE GIST
New results question the finding that the Mars Viking experiments did not find life.

The analysis was based on studying the mathematically complexity of the periment results.

The idea is that living systems are more complicated than purely physical ones, a concept that can be represented mathematically.

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

Further, NASA doesn't need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told
Discovery News.

"The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope -- watch the bacteria move," Miller said.

"On the basis of what we've done so far, I'd say I'm 99 percent sure there's life there," he added.

Miller's confidence stems in part from a new study that re-analyzed results from a life-detection experiment conducted by NASA's Viking Mars robots in 1976.

Researchers crunched raw data collected during runs of the Labeled Release experiment, which looked for signs of microbial metabolism in soil samples scooped up and processed by the two Viking landers. General
consensus of scientists has been that the experiment found geological, not biological, activity.

The new study took a different approach. Researchers distilled the Viking Labeled Release data, provided as hard copies by the original researchers, into sets of numbers and analyzed the results for complexity. Since living systems are more complicated than non-biological processes, the idea was to look at the experiment results from a purely numerical perspective.

They found close correlations between the Viking experiment results' complexity and those of terrestrial biological data sets. They say the high degree of order is more characteristic of biological, rather than
purely physical processes.

Critics counter that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between biological and non-biological processes on Earth so it's premature to draw any conclusions.

"Ideally to use a technique on data from Mars one would want to show that the technique has been well calibrated and well established on Earth. The need to do so is clear; on Mars we have no way to test the
method, while on Earth we can," planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

While not iron-clad, Miller says the findings are an additional plank of evidence challenging the popularly contention that Viking did not find life.

He also is reanalyzing the data to see if there are variations when sunlight was blocked by a weeks-long dust storm on Mars, with the idea being that biological systems would have acted differently to the environmental change than geologic ones. Results of the research are expected to be presented in August.

The research is published online in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences.

Patterns of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Found in Galapagos Reptiles (via Herp Digest)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2012) — Land and marine iguanas and giant tortoises living close to human settlements or tourist sites in the Galápagos Islands were more likely to harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria than those living in more remote or protected sites on the islands, researchers report in a new study.

Feces collected at several different sites from free-living reptiles harbored Escherichia coli bacteria that were resistant to ampicillin, doxycycline, tetracycline and trimethoprin/sulfamethoxazole. Another bacterial species collected from the feces, Salmonella enterica, was found to be only mildly resistant or not resistant at all to the same antibiotics, most likely because of the differing ecology of these two bacterial species in the gut, researchers said.

The study results are reported in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases.

This is not the first study to find that wild animals living near humans or affected by tourism can obtain antibiotic-resistant bacteria from that exposure, said University of Illinois animal sciences professor Roderick Mackie, who led the study. But it does offer researchers and wildlife managers a way to determine which vulnerable animal species are most at risk of exposure to human pathogens.

"Oceanic island systems such as the Galápagos archipelago are ideal for studying patterns and processes of ecology and evolution, such as antibiotic resistance," Mackie said. "Although the data are interesting, we don't have enough data to identify the likely source of antibiotic exposure and origin of the resistance genes, or to draw conclusions about transmission direction."

Also, it is not yet clear "to what extent this potential exposure translates to ongoing exchange of bacterial strains or bacterial traits," the researchers wrote. Further studies are needed "to understand better how human associations influence disease risk in endemic Galápagos wildlife."

The work was carried out by Emily Wheeler as part of her doctoral studies in Mackie's lab, and was supported by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency STAR Fellowship and a student research grant from the Conservation Medicine Center of Chicago. Postdoctoral researcher Pei-Ying Hong and field biologist Lenin Cruz Bedon, of Isla Santa Cruz, Galápagos, are co-authors on the study.

Deep-sea mussels are living hydrogen fuel cells

We're still trying to figure out how to properly harness the power of hydrogen as a clean energy source — and now we might be able to pick up some unexpected pointers from some bizarre symbiotic bacteria found at the ocean depths.
Many mussels found around hydrothermal vents live in a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, which handle key biological functions for their host. In one instance, the bacteria serve as the powerhouse for the mussels, processing materials around them into usable energy. Intriguingly, these bacteria are actually taking in hydrogen as their power source, making them the natural equivalent of the hydrogen fuel cells we're currently working to build.

Hydrothermal vents shoot out a steady stream of inorganic chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonium, methane, iron and, crucially, hydrogen. Since the bottom of the ocean is about as far away from sunlight as it's possible to get, the energy producers that live around these vents cannot make use of photosynthesis like their counterparts on land. Instead, they have to harvest the inorganic chemicals to produce energy, in a process known as chemosynthesis.

Until now, researchers were only aware of two broad types of chemosynthetic microbes - ones that processed hydrogen sulfide for their host, and ones that processed methane. But now researchers at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a third, and it's the hydrogen-harvest bacteria of the Logatchev hydrothermal vent field deep beneath the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

It makes sense that the bacteria at this particular vent would look to hydrogen as an energy source. Logatchev has the highest known hydrogen concentrations in its plumes of any vent, and the researchers calculate that microbes could harvest seven times as much energy using hydrogen as they could with methane, and eighteen times what they could hope to get from hydrogen sulfide.

It appears that these mussels and their symbiotic partners are far from the only organisms to make use of hydrogen as an energy source, but this is the first time that we've actually observed this particular process. Now the only real question is whether there's any chance we can throw some hydrogen and some deep-sea mussels into a car engine, and just sort of see what happens next...

http://io9.com/5831033/deep+sea-mussels-are-living-hydrogen-fuel-cells