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Critical Topics and Their Significance for the UPSC CSE Examination on August 16, 2024
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Extremophile bacteria have learnt to survive microwaves
For Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international Importance
For Mains Examination: GS III - Biology, General Science
Context:
Scientists have isolated microbes from volcanoes, permafrost, acid mines, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and dark lakes kilometres under polar ice. They have also been found thriving on the exteriors of spacecraft and around nuclear waste storage sites. Such microbes are called extremophiles
Read about:
What is a Microbe?
What is a Microbiome?
Key takeaways:
- Microorganisms have become experts at surviving on Earth, inhabiting nearly every environment where life is possible. Through millions of years of evolution, they have developed strategies to adapt to a wide range of habitats.
- Their adaptability allows them to thrive in extreme conditions, where more complex organisms cannot survive.
- Researchers have discovered microbes in a variety of harsh environments, such as volcanic vents, permafrost, acidic mines, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and dark lakes buried deep beneath polar ice caps.
- Microbes have even been found on spacecraft exteriors and around nuclear waste storage sites. These microbes, known as extremophiles, live in extreme natural conditions. Many scientists believe that life on Earth may have originated in an extreme environment, in the form of an extremophile, before evolving and adapting to more temperate ecosystems.
- To survive in extreme environments, microbes utilize unique biological and biochemical processes. Unlike more complex organisms like humans, which rely on a single set of proteins to function, extremophiles have multiple sets of proteins tailored to different environmental conditions.
- These microbes can "activate" the appropriate set of proteins based on the surrounding conditions and their survival needs, such as one set for the intense heat of a volcanic eruption, another for extreme dehydration during a drought, and yet another for the highly acidic environment of a volcanic crater lake
- Our rapidly advancing ability to decode the genomes of organisms—enabled by the increasing efficiency and decreasing costs of sequencing technologies, as well as our capacity to synthesize DNA nucleotides in laboratories—has ushered in a new era of leveraging biological processes to address human challenges.
- By understanding the biological mechanisms that govern extremophiles, researchers could potentially engineer organisms with new capabilities, such as enhancing disease resistance in poultry or creating synthetic biological systems that could bolster the immune system.
- This knowledge could also help scientists establish the boundaries of habitability on other planets. For instance, in 2011, Japanese scientists successfully cultivated microbes in a centrifuge subjected to a g-force over 400,000 times that of Earth’s gravity (1 g).
- Remarkably, some of these microbes didn’t just survive; they thrived, which was a crucial discovery as it showed that microbes are not hindered by the extreme gravitational forces found on massive planets and stars.
- In a 2020 study, scientists demonstrated that Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacteria native to Earth, could survive in outer space for more than three years, clinging to the exterior of the International Space Station while being exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation.
- These studies offer significant implications not onl