Why WOULDN’T We Awaken Microbes That Were Dormant for 100 Million Years?
Robert Wheeler, The Organic Prepper
Scoop Publisher Francesco Abbruzzino
While everyone else was focusing on the spread of COVID-19 and the civil liberty/economic fallout of the crisis, many news stories went unnoticed in 2020. Ironically, many of them had to do with viruses and the possibility of scientists creating an unintentional pandemic.
Researchers retrieve dormant, prehistoric microorganisms…and revive them
One such story involves a team of scientists from the US and Japan, who have been able to “wake up” microbes that have been dormant for nearly 100 million years. The scientists state that these microorganisms began to grow and divide even though they had entered an energy-saving state as far back as the time dinosaurs were still walking the Earth.
The microbes belonged to ten different bacteria groups retrieved from sediments mined in 2010 at the bottom of the South Pacific Gyre, one of the most desolate places in the ocean in terms of nutrients.
“Our results suggest that microbial communities widely distributed in organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of aerobes that retain their metabolic potential under extremely low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 million years,” the researchers wrote.
The research team, led by geomicrobiology’s Yuki Morono of the Japan Marine Science and Technology Agency, had to drill wells 100 meters into the seabed at 5,700 meters below the surface to retrieve the samples. The team of researchers incubated the sleeping microbes for 557 days in a laboratory. Then, researchers applied carbon and nitrogen sources like ammonia, amino acids, and acetate to the microbes to see if they could remove them from their lethargy.
“It is surprising and biologically challenging that a large fraction of the microbes revived after being buried and trapped for so long in conditions of extreme nutrient and energy deficiency,” says Morono.
This success was likely because microbes are aerobic (meaning they require oxygen to live), and oxygen was present in the sediment. The researchers say that if deposits gradually accumulate on the seafloor at a rate not exceeding a yard or two every million years, oxygen can remain present and allow these microorganisms to survive for almost unbelievable amounts of time.
“I was skeptical at first, but we found that up to 99.1% of microbes in sediments deposited 101.5 million years ago were still alive and able to grow,” says study co-author Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island.
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