The third day of #Biochemistry2026 is off to a great start with an inspiring lecture by Schraga Schwartz. He talked about "RNA at the Edge: Extreme Biology as a Lens on RNA Modification Principles".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092867425010827
#Biochemistry #Chemistry #ChemBio #RNA #extremophiles #Archaea
CC: @gdch
💎🌡️ The Cueva de los Cristales is home to giant beams of selenite that grew over hundreds of thousands of years in extreme heat. Scientists recently found dormant #microbes trapped inside the #crystals that may provide clues about how life survives in the harshest environments on #Earth.
👉 https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/crystal-cave
#cave #mexico #geology #microbiology #extremophiles #science #nature #exploration #minerals #discovery #earthscience #biology
🦠🪐 New #research from Johns Hopkins University suggests that the boundary between #planets might be a lot leakier than we thought.
By sandwiching the hardy bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans between steel plates and shooting them at nearly 500 km/h (~300 mph), scientists demonstrated they can survive 30,000 times atmospheric pressure.
#science #space #biology #astronomy #mars #panspermia #extremophiles
#Extremophiles that can digest #radiation ☢️ and toxicities are already used to clean up everything from oil spills to the fallout of radioactive sites.
This means we could #engineer microbes that are resistant to freezing ❄️ temperatures and high levels of radiation.
Given that #microbes 🦠 helped make Earth habitable, we could use synthetic #biology to engineer microbes to speed up a similar process for #Mars 🔴 https://theconversation.com/how-to-engineer-microbes-to-enable-us-to-live-on-mars-253456
🦠 Life can flourish in Earth’s most hostile corners. What does that resilience suggest about where life could persist beyond Earth?
✍️ Read the full exploration: https://TPC8.short.gy/mgHJjLGk
Perhaps the cosmos holds more tenacious possibilities than we expect.
#Astrobiology #Extremophiles #Tardigrades #Habitability #Biodiversity #Cosmos #Microbes #Science #LifeBeyondEarth #Biology #TPC8
The Science of Life Beyond Earth: A Guide to Astrobiology
Astrobiology: Redefining Life’s Boundaries: The Interdisciplinary Quest
Does life exist beyond the pale blue dot we call home? This profound question, once the domain of philosophers and science fiction writers, is now the driving force behind a rigorous, interdisciplinary scientific field: astrobiology. Astrobiology seeks to understand the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. It is not a single discipline but a convergent science, weaving together astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, and planetary science to tackle one of humanity’s greatest mysteries. The core premise of the astrobiology search for life is that the principles of chemistry and physics are universal, and the conditions that led to life on Earth could—and likely do—arise elsewhere. This search operates on two complementary fronts: studying the limits of life on our own planet to understand where and how it can thrive in extreme environments, and identifying promising locations elsewhere in our Solar System and around other stars where similar conditions might exist. The modern astrobiology search for life is grounded in empirical evidence and follows the scientific method, moving from speculation to hypothesis-driven exploration. It compels us to ask fundamental questions: What is life? How did it begin on Earth? What are the absolute requirements for habitability? And what detectable signs, or biosignatures, would life leave behind? The field has matured alongside our exploration of the Solar System and the discovery of exoplanets, transforming a cosmic wonder into a tangible research program with specific targets, missions, and a framework for evaluating potential evidence. The journey of astrobiology is a testament to human curiosity, pushing us to explore the harshest environments on Earth and the most distant points in our galactic neighborhood in pursuit of an answer that would forever change our understanding of our place in the cosmos.
The field gained formal recognition and structure with the establishment of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute in 1998 and has since become a global endeavor. A pivotal moment in the astrobiology search for life was the discovery of extremophiles—organisms on Earth that thrive in conditions once thought utterly inhospitable. Scientists have found life flourishing in the boiling waters of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, within rocks in the arid Antarctic Dry Valleys, in highly acidic lakes, and deep underground, independent of sunlight. These discoveries dramatically expanded the “habitable zone” concept beyond the traditional notion of a planet orbiting at the right distance from its star for liquid water. It introduced the idea of “subsurface habitable zones,” where internal heat from a planet or moon (via radioactive decay or tidal friction) could maintain liquid oceans beneath icy shells, as is suspected on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This paradigm shift means that habitability is not a binary state of a planet, but a potential that can exist in specific niches. The astrobiology search for life is therefore not just about finding Earth-twins; it is about identifying worlds with energy sources, liquid solvents (like water, but potentially others like methane on Titan), and the necessary chemical building blocks. The guiding strategy is “follow the water, follow the carbon, follow the energy.” This approach has led to a prioritized list of targets within our reach: Mars, with its evidence of a wet past; the icy ocean moons Europa and Enceladus; Titan’s unique methane cycle; and, increasingly, the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Each target represents a different chapter in the story of how life might arise and persist, making astrobiology the most ambitious detective story ever undertaken.
The Building Blocks: Habitability and Life’s Raw Materials
A habitable world is one that can support life, not necessarily one that does. Key ingredients include:
The Detective’s Clues: Biosignatures and Technosignatures
Since we cannot yet visit most promising worlds, we must look for remote signs. A biosignature is any measurable substance, pattern, or signal that provides scientific evidence of past or present life. These can be:
Prime Targets in Our Cosmic Backyard and Beyond
The astrobiology search for life is actively pursued on multiple fronts:
Philosophical Implications and the Future
The discovery of even simple microbial life beyond Earth would be a monumental event, demonstrating that life is a cosmic phenomenon and that the universe is biologically active. It would revolutionize biology by providing a “second genesis” for comparative study. Finding no life after exhaustive searching in seemingly habitable places would also be profound, suggesting Earth’s biosphere might be rarer than we think. The astrobiology search for life is ultimately a search for context—for understanding whether life on Earth is a singular miracle or a common piece of the universe’s fabric. As our tools become more sophisticated, this centuries-old question inches closer to an empirical answer, making astrobiology one of the most compelling and consequential scientific endeavors of our time.
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References
"Life can exist on orders of magnitude lower power and sustain their living cells for orders of magnitude more years than previously thought possible. This means that many of these living beings bump up against the energetic limits of life, and in the process seem to have cracked the code for near-immortality. These types of intraterrestrials have such extremely long lifespans that we need a new term to describe the type of extremophiles that they are. The word aeonophiles fits, since they like (-phile) long periods of time (aeon-)."
https://aeon.co/essays/the-discovery-of-aeonophiles-expands-our-definition-of-life
🌋🦠 Extreme life redefined! This “fire amoeba” survives scorching 80°C temps—hotter than any complex life before—proving eukaryotes can thrive in hellish spots. Clues for alien worlds? Rethinking biology’s limits! Read more: https://thedebrief.org/we-need-to-rethink-whats-possible-this-fire-amoeba-proves-complex-life-can-survive-new-extremes/
#GoodNews #FireAmoeba #Extremophiles #LifeDiscovery #ScienceWin
Polar Microbes and Climate Change by Alysson Wagner, 2025
A Molecular Understanding for Sustainable Future
Recent studies on #extremophiles have focused on #thermophiles, microbes that thrive in high temperatures, while #psychrophiles, which prefer cold environments, have received less attention. However, interest in cold-adapted microbes, especially those in polar regions, has increased significantly in recent decades.
#books
#nonfiction
#microbes
#PolarRegions
#ClimateChange
#Springer
The genome of an animal, a deep-sea annelid, that grazes on bacterial growing off hot thermal vents in largely anoxic environments at the bottom of the ocean. Great potential for being a treasure trove of new proteins for use in molecular biology.
"Chromosome-scale genome assembly and gene annotation of the hydrothermal vent annelid Alvinella pompejana yield insight into animal evolution in extreme environments", El Hilali et al. 2025
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12915-025-02369-7
Background The Pompeii worm Alvinella pompejana, a terebellid annelid, has long been an exemplar of a metazoan that lives in an extreme environment, on the chimney wall of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, but this very environment has made it difficult to study. Comprehensive assessment of Alvinella pompejana genome content, and the factors that could explain its ability to thrive in seemingly hostile conditions has been lacking. Results We report the chromosome-level genome sequence of Alvinella pompejana and population-level sequence variants. We produced a set of gene models and analysed the predicted protein set in the light of past hypotheses about the thermotolerance of Alvinella, comparing it to other recently sequenced vent annelids. Despite its extreme environment, we find evidence for relatively conservative evolution of protein amino acid composition and genome evolution as measured by synteny. We suggest that prior hypotheses of loss of amino acid biosynthesis genes associated with obligate symbioses reported in siboglinid annelids are mistaken, and that Alvinella and siboglinids are typical metazoans in this regard. Alvinella encodes a number of respiratory enzymes unusual for bilaterian animals, suggesting an ability to better tolerate hypoxic environments. We find evidence of a parallel increase in the number of globin encoding genes and loss of light sensitive opsins and cryptochromes in deep-sea annelids. Conclusions Our results provide a comprehensive Alvinella protein and genome resource and shed light on the adaptation of Alvinella to temperature, hypoxia and darkness, as well as cryptic speciation, giving a firm base from which future studies can be taken forward.
GDCh Division of Biochemistry
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