Microbial skins are made out of lipids – fatty molecules – which can be preserved as fossils telling us stories about how these microbes lived in the past.
Microbial skins are made out of lipids – fatty molecules – which can be preserved as fossils telling us stories about how these microbes lived in the past. “Some microbial lipids are widely used to reconstruct past climates. They have always been surrounded by mystery, as we did not know which microbes were making them and under which conditions. This lack of information limits the predictive power of these molecules to reconstruct past environmental conditions,” says Sahonero, Now, her study shows which bacteria make these lipids and also how they have evolved their lipid skin to adapt to environmental changes – another step towards reconstructing and predicting climate change in more detail.
Climate Reconstructions
Lipids, the molecular building blocks of the cell membrane, are unique for each microbial species. “It works just like fingerprints, they can be used to identify microbial remains,” says Laura Villanueva, associate professor in the Faculty of Geosciences in Utrecht University and senior scientist at NIOZ. The lipids of ancient microbes can be found in old sediments. Once these molecules from the past are separated, identified and related to currently living groups of bacteria, the lipids can work like ‘biomarkers’. These markers can tell us about the atmospheric and oceanic conditions of the ancient earth, because we know from the living relatives of the microbes how they interact with their environment.
Read more at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research
Image: Set-up of the growth experiments in serum bottles without oxygen for obtaining samples for omics analysis (lipidomic, transcriptomic and proteomics). Photo: Diana Sahonero, NIOZ (Photo Credit: Diana Sahonero, NIOZ)
