News tagged with extremophiles

An extremophile (from Latin extremus meaning "extreme" and Greek philiā (φιλία) meaning "love") is an organism that thrives in physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to most life on Earth. In contrast, organisms that live in more moderate environments may be termed mesophiles or neutrophiles. The category name is unfortunate as it calls for subjective judgements of two issues - firstly, the degree of deviation from 'normal' justifying the use of 'extreme', and secondly, whether the organism prefers the environment or merely tolerates it.

In the 1980s and 1990s, biologists found that microbial life has an amazing flexibility for surviving in extreme environments - niches that are extraordinarily hot, or acidic, for example - that would be completely inhospitable to complex organisms. Some scientists even concluded that life may have begun on Earth in hydrothermal vents far under the ocean's surface. According to astrophysicist Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson, "There are viable bacterial spores that have been found that are 40 million years old on Earth - and we know they're very hardened to radiation."

Most known extremophiles are microbes. The domain Archaea contains renowned examples, but extremophiles are present in numerous and diverse genetic lineages of both bacteria and archaeans. Furthermore, it is erroneous to use the term extremophile to encompass all archaeans, as some are mesophilic. Neither are all extremophiles unicellular; protostome animals found in similar environments include the Pompeii worm, the psychrophilic Grylloblattodea (insects), Antarctic krill (a crustacean) and Tardigrades (water bears).

For more information about Extremophile, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.