Adventures and Discovery: Exploration of Exotic and Extreme Environments, and Limits of Life

Overview: Microbes live practically everywhere in the biosphere, including places where there are no other organisms. This means that the biosphere can be defined as everywhere there is microbial life: microbes and their habitats delineate the biosphere! And there are an extraordinary number of very exotic and extreme places on the planet where microbes live. But the microbes living in extreme environments, such as those characterized by high or low temperatures, salinity, acidity/alkalinity, low humidity, high concentrations of toxic materials, etc., are not generally the same as those living in non-extreme environments and have special activities to deal with the prevailing conditions. Microbiologists like to study such organisms because they often discover completely new forms of life and biological activities. And comparing them with microbes from non-extreme environments tells us a lot about how biological activities work. Moreover, some extreme environments on Earth are not so different from places on other planets, so serve as pragmatic proxies for such planets. Studying the microbes living in such environments inform us about what type of life might exist on other planets, if it does (the topic of astrobiology). So studying the microbes living in exotic environments is incredibly exciting, in terms of the potential to make completely new discoveries, of the exploration of amazing, essentially unknown places on earth, of the adventure of accessing some of them, like the deep sea, and of learning what type of biological processes might exist elsewhere in the universe. Let’s share this excitement lucky microbiologists enjoy and go exploring with them!