Scientists successfully “wake” microbes that had remained dormant for 100 million years

The microbes belong to ten different groups of bacteria that entered an energy-saving state when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Scientists have successfully managed to wake a series of microbes that had remained “asleep” for at least 100 million years. The microbes that existed during the dinosaurs’ time have shown traces of growth in the latest studies.

A team of scientists in the US and Japan says that these prehistoric microorganisms began to grow and divide despite having entered an energy-saving state when dinosaurs were still walking on Earth.

The microbes belonged to ten different bacteria groups and were recovered from sediments mined in 2010 at the bottom of the South Pacific Gyre, one of the most deserted parts of the ocean in terms of nutrients.

“Our results suggest that microbial communities widely distributed in organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of aerobes that retain their metabolic potential under extremely low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 million years,” write researchers in their study.

To obtain samples of the maximum possible depth, they drilled wells of up to 100 meters in the seabed at 5,700 meters below the surface.

The researchers, led by geomicrobiologist Yuki Morono of the Japan Marine Science and Technology Agency, incubated the sleeping microbes for 557 days in a laboratory.

Carbon and nitrogen sources such as ammonia, acetate, and amino acids were supplied to see if they subsequently succeeded in removing them from their torpor.

“It is surprising and biologically challenging that a large fraction of the microbes revived after being buried and trapped for so long in conditions of extreme nutrient and energy deficiency,” admits Morono.

Microbes are aerobic — they require oxygen to live — and oxygen was present in the sediment samples.

According to the researchers, this means that if sediments accumulate gradually on the seafloor, at a rate not exceeding a yard or two every million years, oxygen can remain present and allow these microorganisms to survive for extraordinary periods of time.

“I was skeptical at first, but we found that up to 99.1% of microbes in sediments deposited 101.5 million years ago were still alive and able to grow,” says study co-author Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island.

“Maintaining a physiological capacity for 100 million years in starving confinement is an impressive feature. We want to understand how these ancient microbes evolved, if at all.

This study shows that the subsoil is an excellent location to explore the limits of life on Earth, explain the researchers.

The paper describing the incredible characteristics of the microbes has been published in the Journal Nature Communications.

This is a great achievement since direct evidence of the physiological nature, and survival status of microbial cells in this extremely energy-poor setting is poorly documented.

In addition to proving how resistant some microbes on Earth are, the recent study helps us better understand the possibility of similar microbes existing on other planets or moons in our solar system.

Mars, for example, was likely a planet very similar to Earth in the past.

Although there is currently no evidence of present life on Mars, new exploratory missions of the red planet could help reveal whether such microbes could survive beneath the surface of Mars as well.

(Source: Curiosmos)

Children need microbes, not antibiotics, to develop immunity

Though it's very important to wash our hands and teach the same to our children, these days people have taken it rather very seriously. I agree that it's very important to wash our hands before touching babies, after and during our visits to hospitals, during cold and flu season. But how clean is clean?

A recent study has shown that microbes help a lot to develop immunity among children. But in the name of cleanliness we have been always indulging in removing these tiny organisms called microbes, using hand sanitizers, anti-bacterial soaps and even liberal doses of antibiotics.

Using antibiotics at each and every stage of a child's life can have a negative impact on his/her immune system, according to  microbiologist Marie-Claire Arrieta, co-author of a new book called Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Our Children from an Oversanitized World.

The assistant professor at the University of Calgary, along with her co-author, esteemed microbiologist Brett Finlay, make the case that we’re raising our kids in a cleaner, more hyper-hygienic environment than ever before. They say that overdoing it the way we are is contributing to a host of chronic conditions ranging from allergies to obesity. BRANDIE WEIKLE, a parenting expert, the host of The New Family Podcast and editor of thenewfamily.com, chatted with Arrieta recently to find out more.

What inspired you and Finlay to write Let Them Eat Dirt?
We’re both microbiologists and we’ve been studying the community of microbes that live in our guts — what we call our gut microbiome. In recent years research from our lab and other labs has shown that the health of this microbiome early in life is really crucial to our lifelong health. It’s not just that we’re scientists but we’re both parents. We thought that parents and caregivers would really benefit from us bringing this knowledge to the public.

We’ve been hearing for some time that overusing antibiotics may lead to antibiotic-resistant hospital infections, something we may associate with the elderly and other immune-compromised people. But I gather the implications are much more immediate and individual than that. What’s the connection between microbes and the development of the immune system in childhood?
When we’re born we do not have any microbes. Our immune system is underdeveloped. But as soon as microbes come into the picture, they kick-start our immune system to work properly. Without microbes our immune system can’t fight infections well.

It’s not just the presence of these microbes but what they produce. They produce molecules and substances that directly interact with the cells of the lining in our guts, but also with the immune cells that are on the other side of the lining in our guts. They literally train them. It is only upon the encounter with these microbial substances that an immune cell obtains the information to do what they’re supposed to do. Then these cells in our gut have the ability to transport themselves to other parts of the body to do more training.

It was rare when we were growing up to learn of a peer having a severe nut allergy. In the book you touch on a theory known as the “hygiene hypothesis.” What is that?
The hygiene hypothesis tries to explain why allergies, as well as obesity and inflammatory bowel disease and even autism, these are all diseases on the rise. And this is not explained by genes alone. Our genes simply do not change that fast. Research is consistently showing that it’s these changes in early life exposure to microbes that are driving the rise of these diseases. The lack of microbial exposure early in life that is necessary for our immune systems to be trained properly and to eventually be able to avoid the development of these diseases.

Are there things parents can do — and not do — to make sure they develop a good healthy microbiome and perhaps lower the chances of children contracting allergies, asthma and other related conditions?
Epidemiological evidence shows that kids who are growing up on a farm environment have way less chance of developing asthma. Of course you cannot just pick up your things and become a farmer, but what this suggests is that living in an environment that is less clean is actually better. The same is true for owning a pet, specifically a dog. Let your baby safely play with dogs.

Studies have also shown that cleaning everything that goes in baby’s mouth increases their chances of asthma. The incidence of developing asthma is decreased if the pacifier is cleaned in the parent’s mouth. And all of this points to the fact that we are just living too clean, to a point that it is not beneficial. Hygiene is crucial to our health. We should not stop washing our hands, but we should do it at a time when it is effective at preventing disease spread — before we eat and after using the restroom. Any other time it is not necessary. So if your child is out in the backyard playing with dirt, you do not need to remove that dirt. There’s no benefit from doing so. There has to be a balance between preventing infection, which is still a real threat in society, but also promoting this microbial exposure that is healthy.