by People have long wondered how life was first on earth and whether there is a life in our solar system beyond our planet. Scientists have reason to assume that some of the moons in our solar system – such as Jupiters Europe and Saturns Enceladus – can contain deep, salty liquid oceans under an icy shell. Volcanoes with a sea floor could heat the oceans of this moons and deliver the basic chemicals required for life.
Similar volcanoes with deep sea on earth support microbial life that lives in solid rock without sunlight and oxygen. Some of these microbes, called thermophilic, live at temperatures that are hot enough to cook water on the surface. They grow from the chemicals from active volcanoes.
Since these microorganisms existed before there were photosynthesis or oxygen on earth, scientists believe that they could resemble the earliest habitats and life on earth and beyond.
In 1997, NASA sent the Cassini spaceship into the orbit of Saturn in 1997. The agency also sent three spaceships to Jupiter’s orbit: Galileo 1989, Juno in 2011 and most recently Europa -Clipper 2024.
In order for planetary scientists to interpret the data you collect, you must first understand how similar habitats work and have life on earth.
My microbiological laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Studies Thermophilic from Hot Springs in Volcanas from Tiefsee, also hydrothermal ventilation slots.
Immerse yourself deep for rehearsals of life
I grew up in Spokane, Washington, and had a volcanic country in my house when Mount St. Helens broke out in 1980. This event led to my fascination for volcanoes.
A few years later I collected rehearsals from the hot springs from Mount St. Helens during my studies of oceanography in college and studied a thermophile from the site. Later I collected samples of hydrothermal ventilation slots along a volcanic mountain range from Untersee, the hundreds of miles off the Washington and Oregon coast. I have examined these hydrothermal ventilation slots and their microbes for almost four decades.
U-boat pilots collect the samples that my team made of hydrothermal ventilation slots used using U-boats of people who are occupied by humans or from a distance. These vehicles are reduced to the ocean by research ships, in which scientists do research 24 hours a day, often for weeks.
The collected samples include stones and heated hydrothermal liquids that rise from cracks in the sea floor.
The U -boats use mechanical arms to collect the stones and special sample pumps and bags to collect the hydrothermal liquids. The U -boats usually stay in the sea floor for about a day before they return samples to the surface. You make several trips to the sea floor on each expedition.
In the solid rock of the sea floor, hydrothermal fluids with 662 degrees Fahrenheit (350 Celsius) mix with cold sea water in cracks and pores of the rock. The mixture of hydrothermal liquid and sea water creates the ideal temperatures and chemical conditions that have to live and grow thermophilic.
When the U -boats return to the ship, scientists – including my research team – begin to analyze chemistry, minerals and organic material such as DNA in the collected water and rock samples.
These samples contain living microbes that we can cultivate. Therefore, we grow the microbes where we want to study during the ship. The rehearsals provide a snapshot at how microbes live and grow in their natural environment.
Thermophile in the laboratory
In my laboratory in Amherst, my research team isolates new microbes from the hydrothermal ventilation samples and builds them under conditions that imitate those that they experience in nature. We feed them volcanic chemicals such as hydrogen, carbon dioxide, sulfur and iron and measure their ability to produce connections such as methane, hydrogen sulfide and the magnetic mineral magnetite.
Oxygen is typically fatal to these organisms, so that we grow them in synthetic hydrothermal liquid and in sealed tubes or in large bioreactors that are free of oxygen. In this way we can control the temperature and the chemical conditions that you need for growth.
From these experiments, we are looking for a distinction between chemical signals that these organisms, which can recognize space vehicles or instruments that land on extraterrestrial surfaces.
We also create computer models that best describe how we believe that these microbes grow and compete with other organisms in hydrothermal ventilation slots. We can apply these models to conditions that we believe in early earth or on octagonal pensions to see how these microbes could cut out under these conditions.
Then we analyze the proteins from the thermophiles that we collect to understand how these organisms work and adapt to changing environmental conditions. All of this information leads our understanding of how life can exist in extreme environments and beyond the earth.
Use for thermophile in biotechnology
Research on Thermophiles not only offers helpful information for planetary scientists. Many of the proteins in thermophiles are new to science and useful for biotechnology.
The best example of this is an enzyme called DNA polymerase that is used to artificially replicate the DNA in the laboratory by the polymerase chain reaction. The DNA polymerase was used for the first time for the polymerase chain reaction Thermous Aquaticus 1976. This enzyme must be heat -resistant so that replication technology works. Everything from genom sequencing to clinical diagnoses, crime solution, genealogy tests and genetic engineering uses DNA polymerase.
My laboratory and others examine how thermophile can be used to impair waste and produce economically useful products. Some of these organisms grow on milk from dairy farms and brewery waste – materials that cause fish killings and dead zones in ponds and bays. The microbes then produce organic drugs from the waste – a connection that can be used as an energy source.
Hydrothermal ventilation slots are among the most fascinating and unusual environments on earth. With them, windows can be on earth for the first time and beyond the bottom of our oceans.
This article will be released from the conversation, a non -profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and trustworthy analyzes to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: James F. Holden, Umass at
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James F. Holden receives funds from NASA.
