E. coli gets off the couch, becomes an extremophile

Can you create an extremophile? The microbes living and thriving at the fringes of the biosphere manage to get by in spite of extreme temperatures, radiation levels, and pressures (did I miss any?) that most other life forms would choke on. But how easy would it be for an organism that prospers in the warm embrace of our digestive tract to make a change in lifestyle and become an extremophile? Pretty easy, as it turns out.

A Commentary in mBio describes a directed evolution experiment that got Escherichia coli to develop the ability to survive exposure to high pressure. Over a very short evolutionary time scale, E. coli evolved to resist pressures as high as 2 Gpa – about three times the pressure it originally tolerated. E. coli’s newfound ability flies in the face of “common knowledge”, which held that giga Pascal range pressures would kill off vegetative microorganisms by irreversibly denaturing proteins and disrupting membrane-related processes. The results of this experiment indicate that this platitude was wrong and that E. coli has had the genetic tools to overcome high pressures all along.

To put it in human terms, Vanlint et al. basically took E. coli, kicked it off the La-Z-Boy and snatched away its Doritos, put it in training and taught it how to live like an X Games medalist. At a time of the year when New Year’s resolutions inevitably succumb to apathy and inertia, it’s an inspiring parable of personal reinvention. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it…

Comments

[LoveThatBug]

Whilst this encourages me knowing that if e coli can "become a better bug" then I to can improve myself.

But when I consider the implications in terms of the obvious ability of pathogenic bacteria to adapt to conditions that we believe should kill them - scares the life out of me.

[mBio]

Touché, LTB. Maybe you could say the authors put E. coli through "Extremist training"?