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Cells that breathe oxygen and sulfur at the same time
In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.
The findings “remind us yet again of just how much we still have to learn about microbial diversity and metabolism,” said Natalia Mrnjavac, a graduate student in evolutionary microbiology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany who was not involved in the study. The findings, which were published earlier this year in Nature Communications, challenge assumptions about the limits of cellular respiration and may give researchers a model for understanding how life walks the edge of paradise and poison. He and his team study the mix of hardy microbes living in the seams between the surface and subterranean worlds, including the volcanic vents and thermal pools of Yellowstone National Park, not far from his university in Montana.
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