These extremeophiles are members of the Archaea and typically are organisms that
are new to science.Are these things of any use to us? Well, the extremeophiles
have been of interest not just to marine microbiologists but to biotechnologists
as well.
There
was an advertisement in Nature magazine a couple of years ago which
shows a little glimpse of a colony of tube worms. It was an ad for something
called vent DNA polymerases. As I'm sure most of you know, one of the key
breakthroughs in molecular biology was the invention of the polymerase chain
reaction. It's a molecular technique that allows an enormous variety of
different types of molecular studies to be done. It's based on the use of
heat stable DNA polymerase enzymes. Well, it turns out when you go down
to the hydrothermal vents, you can find bacteria that generate an enzyme,
the so called vent DNA polymerase,which turns out to be a very stable enzyme
for doing the sorts of molecular reactions that people have as their bread
and butter techniques. In fact, there are many varieties of polymerases
now available commercially. So it's an interesting example of how when one
goes into an extreme environment, one finds some really oddball organisms
that actually yield some commercially important products.
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