What Are Two Examples Of Extremophiles And How Do Scientists Hypothesize They May Help Us Understand Life?

Not many people fully know what happened at Chernobyl, or understand the effect it has had on today’s nuclear science. Chernobyl has been named as the largest man-made disaster ever recorded. Chernobyl is the most influential and important event during the 1980’s because it has completely changed how the world views anything nuclear by changing experimentation and usage of nuclear materials and power as a whole. It was extremely influential because it caused thousands of people to move out of their homes, while damaging nearby cities and countries and covering the surrounding area in radioactive smog, and is still a threat to surrounding cities and countries today. It also has caused the nearby area to be thriving with wildlife.

On the earth, millions of organisms live in various environments. They need certain temperature, pH, nutrient growth, certain range of salt, pressure, water and so on. However, some organisms can live beyond these conditions which mean they can survive in extreme environmental conditions called Extremophiles (Gupta, Khare et al., 2014). These extreme environments are: highly pressure, acidic or alkaline region, high temperature or extreme low temperature condition. These organisms have different characterisation and biochemical mechanism for tolerating some environmental conditions on the earth. They adopt to live in extreme condition by different enzymes or biomolecules. There are different types of Extremophiles. For example, thermophiles, acidophiles, barophiles, radiophiles, halophiles, xerophiles, osmophiles. There are two main types of extreme conditions: physical (radiation, Temperature, pressure) and geochemical (pH, salinity). These microorganisms found in various typical environments on the earth. Some grow in the deep sea where the pressure is very high and some can survive in Antarctica, the place always having ice and glaciers. Extremophiles can tolerate extreme conditions but also they have to need those environments for their growth. Extremophiles organisms present in all three domains bacteria, archaea and eukarya but most of extremophiles are come from archaea group. Archaea have

The presence of a magnetic field means that there is some type of internal heat source along with a liquid ocean making the idea of habitability possible below the surface.

Deinococcus radiodurans is a member of the bacteria kingdom, belonging to the phylum Deinococcus-Thermus, and more specifically, the Deinococus genus. It is spherical in shape, and approximately 1.5 to 3.5 µm in diameter. It is usually found in tetrad formation: where four individual cells stick together. D. radiodurans isn 't known the cause any diseases, nor does it form endospores, and it stains gram positive. It is non-motile, and an obligate aerobic chemoorganoheterotroph. What makes D. radiodurans so unique, is its ability to withstand ionizing radiation, UV light, desiccation, and even oxidizing and reducing agents. When D. radiodurans was first discovered in 1956 by Arthur Anderson, it showed only a fraction of its amazing survivability. While Anderson was performing experiments to determine if canned food could be purified when exposed to high doses of gamma radiation: the meat still spoiled and from it D. radiodurans was isolated. Due to the fact that D. radiodurans can survive in such toxic situations, and that it is found in a wide variety of environments, scientists have long been toying with the idea of using D. radiodurans for bioremediation.

Microbes are bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. The earth was formed 4.6 million years ago. And a few million years later, by 3.5 billion years ago, earth was already inhabited by a diversity of organisms. The earliest organism is Prokaryotes and within the next billion years, two distinct groups of prokaryotes called bacteria and archaea diverged. Eukaryotes cell evolved from a prokaryotes community, a host cell containing even smaller prokaryotes .The microbial world accounted for all known life forms for nearly 50 to 90% of Earth's history. We are still researching microbial organisms today in marine environment, extreme environments. A microbial observatory is an NSF-funded project dedicated to the discovery and characterization of novel microorganisms and microbial communities of diverse

Two miles underground in the Vale Creighton mine lies an advance lab far from the common world. In this lab many experiments are done from sub-atomic and astro-particle physics to the reactions of fruit flies to this underground environment. But one of the experiments is how organisms react to the absence of radiation underground and how it effects life. SnoLab the company in charge of this facility calls this experiment REPAIR (Researching the Effects of the Presence and Absence of Ionizing Radiation).

1) Organisms that can exist with light as an energy source and an inorganic form of carbon and other raw materials

Finally there is the Hyperthermophiles. Found in very hot temperatures such as hydrothermal vents in deep oceans. With this said, the two microorganisms that I worked with would be known as Mesophiles. Both of these microorganisms grow on or in the human body. They prefer moist heat that is body temperature. I made an incubation box to help mimic the temperatures needed. Typically trying to maintain the temperature of thirty seven degrees Celsius.

Romero, C., Audeskirk, T., & Audeskirk, T. (2011). Instructor guide for Biology life on earth, ninth ed. [and] Biology life on earth with physiology, ninth ed. Benjamin Cummings.

Radiation is one of the most potent mass killers, “You would be very, very lucky to walk away” from a dose of 5 grays, Sloan said. Tardigrades are almost guaranteed to survive 6000-7000 grays of radiation, this means that Tardigrades can survive even inside nuclear power plants. The Tardigrade’s resilience to radiation is one of the key defense systems it has and one of the essential reasons that is survived all of the mass extinction events.

There are tiny creatures called extremophiles that live here. Inside the creature's cell membrane, they have specially adapted structures. These structures pump out acidic substances allowing these microorganisms to thrive.

The deinococceae is a family of the uttermost radiation-resistant organisms. This bacterium, deinococcus radiodurans, was identified by a man and his co-workers in 1951 in Oregon. It was detected in a can of ground meat that became ruined. This bacterium has a boundless supply of environments in which it is found, from elephant dung to granite in Antarctic dry valleys. D. radiodurans have been found in nuclear reactors and nobody knows how they got there, but they just seem to go places and it is a mystery to everyone as to

The most spectacular discovery about Deinococcus radiodurans, the first poly-extremophile bacterium, is that it has developed an incredible amount of unexplainable resistance to radiation. It has remarkable DNA repair mechanisms which cannot be explained just by examining the genome and research seemingly yields no concrete data regarding what infers the resistivity against ionizing radiation. It can withstand at least a thousand times more radiation than a human can, in addition to UV radiation, desiccation, cold and acid. It has no known particular natural habitat as it has been found across a diverse range of environments, including in the Antarctic dry valleys, an environment on Earth that’s thought to closely resemble that of Mars. The microbe contains 4-10 copies of its genome and although the radiation causes extensive breaks in the genome, the microbe is able to utilize unique but poorly-understood DNA repair mechanisms that ensure reasonable fidelity. The genome has been sequenced and a protein has been found within its sequence that confers radiation resistance, RecA. Researchers are looking to take advantage of this protein by genetically engineering D. radiodurans to function in environmental clean-up, to speed up the process as well as reduce the costs. Future prospects of this bacteria include additional selective genetic engineering to metabolize a range of toxic organic compounds and to assess if life is possible in space, specifically on Mars. This bacterium

2. Zion, Michal, et al. "UV Radiation Damage And Bacterial DNA Repair Systems." Journal Of Biological Education (Society of Biology) 41.1 (2006): 30-33. Academic Search Complete. Web 15 Oct. 2014.

The Chernobyl accident was a disastrous nuclear event that happened on 26th April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The Chernobyl disaster is classified as a level 7 event according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (only two events have been classified this high in the past) and has caused damages that consist of the cost of 500,000 workers and 18 billion rubles, 31 deaths according to the Soviet casualty count (this is still being disputed) and between 4000-27000 affected future deaths due to radiation exposure [G1].