Japanese Researchers Succeed in Growing Ancient Microbe

Petri dish
Photo by Drew Hays on Unsplash

Physics major Matt Kafker studies a range of soft and hard science subjects as a university student. In addition to studying psychology, linguistics, and foreign languages in school, Matthew “Matt” Kafker is involved in research related to microbial ecology, a field that studies bacteria colonies in varying environments.

In August 2019, a team in Japan announced that it had successfully grown a simple organism from mud that had been collected from the seabed. This success came after 12 years of attempts, and could serve as the missing link between complex and simple cells.

The entire process began in 2006 when the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology obtained a sample of seabed mud brought up from the Omine Ridge, a 2,500-meter-deep ridge of the coast of Japan. Researchers eventually discovered microbes in one of the tubes of mud. Some of these microbes belonged to the class Asgard archaeon, a specific type of microbe that scientists believe played a role in the formation of mitochondria about 2 billion years ago.

These microbes are very difficult to detect and study since they grow slowly and in inhospitable environments. However, the scientists in Japan were able to get enough of the microbe to study after about 20 days. This ultimately led to them growing arachaea prometheoarchaeum syntophicum, a single-cell organism that contained some of the same genes found in eukaryotes, which are sophisticated microbes found in plants, humans, and other animals.

Though it’s not clear whether this microbe was a true ancestor to eukaryotes, the ability to grow Asgard archaea will help advance additional studies into microbiology and the early stages of life.