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| Astrobio.net at Paoha Island, Mono Lake, California |
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| 09/22/10 |
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| September 21, 2010
Astrobiology Magazine’s field research editor, Henry Bortman, is spending the week with a group of NASA and USGS scientists at Mono Lake, in California. On Tuesday, the group went by boat to Hot Spring Cove, on Mono Lake’s Paoha Island, to collect samples of cyanobacteria and to set up a field experiment that will be completed on Thursday. Shelly Hoeft (left) of the USGS and Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA research fellow with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, are shown here preparing the experiment.
The hot springs on Paoha Island contain high concentrations of both sulfide and arsenite, and the microorganisms that live in the springs have adapted to use these chemicals as food.
Wolfe-Simon and Hoeft’s experiment involved scraping cyanobacterial slime from rocks at the bottom of a small, steaming-hot shoreline pool, injecting the bacteria into test tubes and then putting the tubes back into the pool’s 65-degree-C (149-degree-F) water, to be left for two days. Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic: they use sunlight as energy to drive chemical reactions. To test whether the Paoha bacteria are able to take advantage of the hot spring’s unusual chemistry while performing photosynthesis, half the tubes were covered with aluminum foil to block sunlight.
At another nearby pool, the researchers collected samples that they then froze with liquid nitrogen for later DNA analysis that will enable them to catalogue the various types of microorganisms living there.
Credit: Henry Bortman
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