By Reagan Colyer, MSU News Service
BOZEMAN — A pair of researchers in the Montana State University College of Agriculture received a grant from the National Science Foundation last month that will help advance the understanding of microorganisms that live in some of Yellowstone National Park’s hottest environments.
Professors Bill Inskeep of the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences and Mensur Dlakic of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology were awarded nearly $300,000 through the Opportunities for Promoting Understanding through Synthesis program. The OPUS funding is designed to synthesize a large collection of existing data and place it in a larger context. After more than two decades of research in Yellowstone, Inskeep said there is a seemingly endless number of research sites and different microorganisms that warrant further examination.
Inskeep’s work focuses on thermophiles, microorganisms that live and thrive in extremely hot environments. The geothermal sites of major interest contain organisms that live in temperatures higher than 165 degrees Fahrenheit. He began working with Dlakic, a biochemist and informatics expert, about 10 years ago. Their skills complement each other well, said Inskeep, and the two have partnered on several publications documenting the ecological behavior of these single-celled organisms.
“I’ve been working in Yellowstone since 1999, and we recognized early on that there were a lot of environments that hadn’t been characterized or studied,” Inskeep said. “Our main goal here is to curate and publish the genome sequences of numerous thermophiles to create a reference set of common organisms in Yellowstone.”
Over the next two years, Inskeep and Dlakic will identify environments that contain particularly interesting or novel organisms. They have sequenced the genomes of many of these organisms and will take a closer look to see where they fit on the Tree of Life — a framework by which species are connected and related to one another — to determine evolutionary and ecological connections.
“There are some marker genes that are unique enough to analyze an organism to see where it belongs on this phylogenetic tree,” said Dlakic. “The idea is to compare their genetic sequences. If we see that some of them fall in an area where there aren’t many known groups of organisms, they are more novel and worth studying. It’s more important to be describing something new rather than a part of this tree that’s already very well populated and understood.”
The main challenge when attempting to categorize Yellowstone’s microorganisms, said Dlakic, is the sheer diversity of thermophiles. Sampling the top few millimeters of a Yellowstone mineral mat can offer a completely different array of lifeforms than a sample taken from an inch down, to say nothing of the number of hot springs and other geologic features in Yellowstone.
“A hot spring in Yellowstone can have 50 or 100 organisms present,” Dlakic said. “When you try to sequence DNA from that, it’s like mixing the pieces of 100 different puzzles together and then trying to solve them.”
Inskeep has identified 50 to 80 thermophiles that could provide new knowledge to the scientific community if they were fully sequenced and placed in the Tree of Life. Many of them are archaea — single-celled organisms that existed long before humans, and which are less understood than many multi-cellular lifeforms.
“Understanding where thermophiles belong on the Tree of Life will help us determine our own evolutionary history. So, the study of thermophiles is also relevant to the origin of life,” said Inskeep. “The release of a large reference genome database of Yellowstone thermophiles should serve a tremendous value to future research scientists and resource managers in Yellowstone responsible for protecting these remarkable habitats.”
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