SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Plucking a Strand of Genetic Insight From the Sea
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By filtering through 25 gallons of seawater from Puget Sound, a computer scientist in Washington State has managed to tease out and sequence the DNA of a
tiny microbe that has eluded scientists for years.
The creature is Euryarchaeota, one of the archaea, a class of micro-organisms that were once thought to be bacteria but are actually quite distinct.
"Nobody's been able to grow it in a laboratory despite trying," said Vaughn Iverson, the computer scientist and doctoral student in oceanography at the
University of Washington whose software sequenced the genome. Mr. Iverson and his colleagues gathered seawater from the sound near Seattle and filtered it so
it contained only organisms smaller than 0.8 microns. That is really, really tiny: The width of a human hair is about 100 microns.
"What we had to do was take this mixture of DNA from multiple organisms and tease out the genome," said E. Virginia Armbrust, a biological oceanographer
at the University of Washington.
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