Deep sea vents yield thousands of new microbes

US: Thousands of new kinds of marine microbes have been discovered at two deep-sea hydrothermal vents off the Oregon coast by U.S. scientists, the journal Science reported Thursday.

Using a new analytical technique called “454 tag sequencing,” scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory and the University of Washington surveyed one million DNA sequences of bacteria and archaea, two of the three major domains of life.

The DNA was taken from samples collected from two vents on the Pacific deep-sea volcano, Axial Seamount. The researchers discovered that while there may be as few as 3,000 different kinds of archaea at these sites, the bacteria exceed 37,000 different kinds.

“Most of these bacteria had never been reported before, and hundreds were so different from known microbes that we could only identify them to the level of phylum,” says lead author, Julie Huber of the MBL.

Washington, Friday, Xinhua