Monday, March 06, 2006

News: Microbes in Hydrothermal Systems Give Clues to Life's Origins

Researchers find ways heat-loving microbes create energy.

Curiosity about the microbial world drove Jan Amend, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to Vulcano Island, Italy, a shallow hydrothermal Shangri-la near Sicily. There, Amend and his collaborators managed to examine the environment in depth, design a gene probe, and discover new life–which could have some big implications for the origin and presence of life on Earth.

Posted on the AAAS EurekaAlert site. Sign up for EurekaAlerts from AAAS with the RSS feed option, using a reader such as Bloglines.

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