What is it about?
Life finds a way. Even at the bottom of the ocean where there is no sunlight and very little oxygen, microbes thrive, fed by energy and molecules from rocks that transform upon meeting cold salt water. Scientists at the University of Utah brought some of that weird, rock-powered life to the surface as reported in PLOS ONE. Undergraduates Payton Utzman, Briggs Miller and Mary Fairbanks, working with graduate student Vincent Mays searched the combined genes from many microbes at the Lost City Hydrothermal Field and found DNA repair genes. Finding DNA repair at this special environment has important implications for Astrobiology and how life might survive on other planets and moons. This work was funded by the NSF @nsf and by UROP @urop
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Why is it important?
The origins of the GO DNA repair pathway are unknown. The discovery of GO DNA repair enzymes in metagenomes from the Lost City Hydrothermal Field help us understand conditions where microbes find GO DNA repair advantageous. The chemical transformation of certain rocks when these contact sea water raises the temperature and consumes oxygen, resulting in an environment with high pH and almost no molecular oxygen. The repair of lesions with oxidized guanine appears to be advantageous even in environments that lack molecular oxygen and probably evolved well before the Great Oxidation Event. These insights need to be considered when developing models for the origin of cell based life and for how life may have emerged on other planets.
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This page is a summary of: Metagenome mining and functional analysis reveal oxidized guanine DNA repair at the Lost City Hydrothermal Field, PLoS ONE, May 2024, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284642.
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