June 6, 2008
By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
They like the cold, they don't need much oxygen, and you can fit 62 trillion of them into a teaspoon.
They're also 120,000 years old.
Those are the salient characteristics of a new species of ultrasmall bacteria discovered deep inside a glacier by researchers at Penn State University.
The Chryseobacterium greenlandensis were isolated from an ice core from 1.8 miles beneath the surface of a glacier in Greenland.
Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, the lead researcher on the Penn State team, said the new species adds one more sliver of enlightenment to the vast and mostly unexplored universe of microorganisms.
Microbes make up a third of all living material on Earth, Dr. Loveland-Curtze said, "yet fewer than 8,000 microbes have been described out of the approximately 3 million that are presumed to exist."
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