'Dead' DNA feeds deep sea life

Climatotherapy: there is life in the Dead Sea.

Compatible and counteracting solutes: protecting cells from the Dead Sea to the deep sea.

Cells of many organisms accumulate certain small organic molecules--called compatible and counteracting solutes, compensatory solutes, or chemical chaperones--in response to certain physical stresses. These solutes include certain carbohydrates, amino acids, methylamine and methylsulphonium zwitterions, and urea. In osmotic dehydrating stress, these solutes serve as cellular osmolytes. Unlike c...

Deep sea microbes and DNA cloning.

RNAbor provides a new tool for researchers in the biological and related sciences to explore important aspects of RNA secondary structure and folding pathways. RNAbor computes statistics concerning d-neighbors of a given input RNA sequence and structure (the structure can, for example, be the minimum free energy (MFE) structure). A d-neighbor is a structure that differs from the input structure...

Chemosynthesis in the deep-sea: life without the sun

indirectly provides oxygen, a byproduct of photosynthesis, which aerobic chemosynthetic microorganisms require to synthesize organic carbon from CO2. Planktonic life stages of many vent and cold seep invertebrates also directly feed on photosynthetically produced organic matter as they disperse to new vent and seep systems. While a large portion of the life at deep-sea chemosynthetic habitats c...

How Deep-Sea Wood Falls Sustain Chemosynthetic Life

Large organic food falls to the deep sea--such as whale carcasses and wood logs--are known to serve as stepping stones for the dispersal of highly adapted chemosynthetic organisms inhabiting hot vents and cold seeps. Here we investigated the biogeochemical and microbiological processes leading to the development of sulfidic niches by deploying wood colonization experiments at a depth of 1690 m ...