Weird, Ultra-small Microbes Turn Up in Acidic Mine Drainage …at On Orbit
…a reiteration of this Astrobiology Magazine piece …itself a re-echo of this U.Cal Berkeley News Bite. Basically the ARMAN (Archaeal Richmond Mine Acidophilic Nanoorganisms) microbes, classified with the Archaea, are very small, but still independently subsisting organisms, perhaps even predated upon by Thermoplasma archaea they share their habitat with. Their genomes are very small, a mere million base-pairs – smaller than the genome of the giant Mimivirus family of amoeba infecting viruses. More interestingly the code is stripped back, with its genes averaging a mere 774 base-pairs long – i.e. not a lot of unexpressed material. Human genes can be very large, even when the proteins coded by the gene aren’t themselves so large. The ARMAN microbes are virtually the “minimal lifeform” sought after by artificial life researchers, living in quite extreme environments – more acidic than battery acid is the description. Interestingly, for astrobiology, the clouds of Venus are similarly acidic…
Latest paper: Enigmatic, ultrasmall, uncultivated Archaea