A cold, oil-eating bacterium from an Antarctic lake that never freezes.
Halospina sp. nov.
Deep Lake sits in the Vestfold Hills of Antarctica. It's so salty it stays liquid at −18 °C, and it's ruled by pink, salt-loving archaea. Hidden in DNA sequenced from 24 meters down in 2008 was a bacterium no one had ever named: a cold-adapted rod that breathes nitrate when oxygen runs out and carries the genes to eat oily hydrocarbons.
- Found in
- Deep Lake, Antarctica · 24 m
- Genome
- 3.28 Mb · 99.8% complete
- Contamination
- 0.0%
- Closest relative
- H. denitrificans · 89.2%
- 16S barcode
- 1,526 bp, complete
- Species cutoff
- 95% (it's 89%)
Status: genome checked, tree built (bootstrap 100). Data owners at UNSW contacted. Name to be proposed under the SeqCode.
Every unnamed lineage found so far.
All passed the quality bar for naming (over 90% complete, under 5% contaminated) and sit below the 95% similarity line to every named species in GTDB. None have official names yet.
No boat, no lab. Just public DNA.
Scientists all over the world upload the DNA they sequence. Most of it is never fully searched. This is what we do with it.
Pick the weird places
Hot springs, Antarctic brine, deep seafloor, mine runoff: low-diversity, extreme, under-studied.
Rebuild the genomes
Millions of DNA shreds get reassembled and sorted into individual organisms.
Check what's new
Every genome is compared against roughly 700,000 known ones, plus every newer one we can find.
Prove and name it
Family trees, barcodes, quality checks, then a formal name under the SeqCode.
Phylum Hunt is running live.
Screening 100 deep, dark samples for life that doesn't fit any known phylum.
"New" means not matching any species in GTDB (release 226) or any newer genome we screened. Some of these were also recovered, unnamed, by large automated catalogs; where that's the case, it's noted. Traits are predicted from genes, not observed under a microscope.