Most visitors to Maine are familiar with the murky — often smelly — mudflats that line much of our coast. What they may not realize, though, is that these kinds of tidal environments are home to a whole world of wacky, resilient, and understudied microbes.
In fact, a team of researchers that includes several Bigelow Laboratory scientists recently discovered an entirely new lineage of unusual microbes in Edgecomb Eddy, one of these mudflats not far from our lab. This new group is closely related to another previously discovered group of microbes. Both groups can thrive buried beneath muddy sediments without oxygen, but the surprise is that they do so with drastically different cellular structures.
The discovery provides a valuable opportunity to better the cellular structures that power complex life and the evolutionary processes that help microbes adapt to extreme environments. It’s a nice reminder of how much more there is to discover in the diverse and complex world of microbial life — and how special our backyard is!
