While bacteria are often associated with icky germs, they are actually so much more than that. They help us deepen things, feed trees nitrogen, play an enormous role in cycling the earth’s nutrients, and survive extreme extremes. Recently, we discovered some of these incredibly tough and thin packages of life can even live alone from the air.
A few years ago, scientists discovered bacteria in Antarctic soil that not only inhale air but also eat it. Now, a new study shows that these microbes could have been present elsewhere, discovered through genetic analysis of soils from the three most icy regions of our planet – the Arctic, Antarctic, and Tibetan Plateaus.
Because these bacteria have so far been discovered in very low-nutrient environments, they probably play an important role in fueling the (likely sparse) life around them.
“There are huge ecosystems that are likely to rely on this new microbial carbon fixation process, in which microbes use the energy they receive from breathing in atmospheric hydrogen gas to convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into carbon – to grow. , “explained microbiologist Belinda Ferrari of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.
The process – so-called atmospheric chemosynthesis – contributes to photosynthesis and geothermal chemotrophy as yet another way primary producers can create their own organic building blocks for growth and energy storage, with reactions based on inorganic materials.
These particular bacteria oxidize hydrogen from the air to drive a series of reactions that convert atmospheric carbon into living tissues, which other life forms can also make use of – by consuming.
“We think this process occurs at the same time in addition to photosynthesis when conditions change, such as in the polar winter when there is no light,” Ferrari said.
“Although more work is needed to confirm that this activity occurs worldwide, the fact that we discovered the target genes at the bottom of the three poles means that this novel process is likely to occur in cold deserts around the world, but is so far just review. “
Their eating habits, which directly remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the fact that they are perhaps more widespread than we realize, reveal another potential carbon sink.
“Our finding probably points to atmospheric chemosynthesis contributing to the global carbon budget,” Ferrari said.
Microbial ecologist Angelique Ray, Ferrari, and her colleagues searched 122 soil samples from 14 ice-free, cold desert sites for genes uniquely linked to atmospheric chemosynthesis. These sites are exposed to regular freeze-box cycles, burning UV radiation, and extremely low levels of moisture, carbon, and nitrogen.
Here, even photosynthetic microbes are rare. However, the researchers found these genes in different abundance on each site.
The team suspects that microbes using this low-resource carbon fixation strategy may be widespread through desert regions with fusing hunger, which are set to increase due to global warming.
These largely barren areas currently cover 35 percent of the earth’s surface, but by the end of the century are expected to cover up to 56 percent.
The researchers now hope to isolate bacterial airborne bacteria to learn more about them, and look for signs of their presence in other ecosystems.
With some luck (and a lot of hard work) these cell communities were able to increase our understanding of life’s essential carbon fixation systems of our planet and provide insight into the possibility of similar life forms that exist elsewhere in our Universe.
If bacteria could survive by simply polluting the Earth’s atmosphere, they could do another thing differently in the solar system and beyond.
This study was published in Frontiers in microbiology.
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