image: Places that alternate between wet and dry, like dishwashers, are good places to look for extremophiles in your home. Participatory scientist Susan S. submitted this observation to The Extremophile Campaign: In Your Home through CitSci.org.
Credit: Susan S./CitSci.org (CC-BY 3.0 License)
Climate change solutions might be lurking in the dark recesses of your home, according to microbiologist James Henriksen, and he’s encouraging everyone to get involved in the search for extremophiles, organisms that survive in extreme environments – including your water heater, air conditioner and dishwasher.
Henriksen, a Colorado State University scientist, said these microbes, or microscopic organisms, have adapted to harsh conditions and have developed specialized traits – some of which could be beneficial to people by gobbling up carbon dioxide or cleaning harmful pollutants from the environment.
The Extremophile Campaign: In Your Home – a partnership among CitSci, the Two Frontiers Project and SeedLabs – launched in October to leverage participatory science in the quest to identify helpful organisms. Henriksen said they’ve already made some new discoveries.
"We believe that we have found new organisms, and we know that they have unique characteristics purely from the fact that they're growing and thriving in some of these unusual environments,” he said.
Henriksen and his collaborators recently discovered one such microbe with an appetite for carbon dioxide in volcanic ocean vents – a CO2-rich environment – off the island of Vulcano in the Aegean Sea. The microbe – nicknamed “Chonkus” – can capture carbon dioxide quickly, and it sinks, essentially sequestering concentrated carbon dioxide.
Chonkus is a type of cyanobacteria, which feed on carbon dioxide through photosynthesis like plants, only they can consume much more CO2 than their multi-celled counterparts.
“Half the air you're breathing comes from microbes,” Henriksen said, adding that they play key roles in carbon and nitrogen cycles and are essential for life on the planet.
Is your home really the final frontier for seeking out new life?
Henriksen co-founded the Two Frontiers Project, a nonprofit research group dedicated to exploring microbial life from the depths of the oceans to the far reaches of space.
“There's not just unknown species,” he said. “It's like there's a rainforest everywhere you look, and we know almost nothing about the organisms there and what they can do.”
Henriksen said our homes are colonized by bacteria that are harmless and just part of the household ecosystem.
So, if you boldly go where you might not want to go because it’s kind of gross, instead of being ashamed of the slime, crust or ooze inhabiting your appliances, you can now contribute to scientific discovery simply by making observations and answering a few questions. What you see or smell and the colors you notice are data points that could help scientists understand extremophiles, Henriksen said.
Most microbes aren’t visible to the naked eye, but once enough of these microscopic, single-celled organisms build up into a noticeable film, they are demonstrating capabilities that could potentially be harnessed to solve human problems.
Microbes of interest
Where can you find extremophiles in your home, and how do you know when you’ve found one?
“Look in places that are hot or cold or that alternate between wet and dry,” said Sarah Newman, director of operations at CitSci.org, the participatory science web platform and support system that is managing the campaign. Substances of interest might be slimy, crusty or gooey. Or, as Newman puts it, “those kinds of things that normally you'd be like, ‘Let's clean that.’”
Contributing to the campaign is as easy as uploading a photo of your discovery and filling out an online survey. If the researchers want a physical sample for testing, they’ll mail you a collection kit to send back.
Henriksen and his team, which includes undergraduate student researchers from across the University, will decipher the DNA of all the organisms collected for testing through metagenomic sequencing. Samples will be frozen and stored for future study, and organisms with valuable characteristics will be cultivated and tested.
Extremophiles in the wild
Natural springs have unusual chemistry, and Colorado, California and other western states have a lot of springs rich in carbon dioxide that could contain useful microbes.
Strange green slimes floating in the water or brown goo on rocks could be key to sustainability solutions.
"Life is surviving and thriving in this hot water, in water that is as carbonated as soda pop and as acidic as lemon juice,” Henriksen said. “Microbes are pulling high concentrations of CO2 out of the water, out of the air, and they're building that slime or the green algae that you see.”
Researchers are asking anyone with knowledge of springs with unusual features to document them for The Extremophile Campaign: In the Wild, a sister project to In Your Home that launched this spring.
Tool for crowdsourcing science
You can join either campaign or both from the CitSci.org website, where you will find more information about where to look and instructions.
CitSci – short for citizen science – helps researchers crowdsource data collection and maintain it in one place, accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
This assistance is important to research projects like the two extremophile campaigns. Microbial life is so vast and diverse that the projects are seeking observations from as many people and places as possible to try to uncover the extent of variation.
Both Henriksen and CitSci are based in CSU's Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory. The web platform was developed by two CSU graduate students about 20 years ago and has since supported almost 1,500 participatory science projects around the world.
"CitSci has been an amazing partner in helping get this up and running," he said. “We believe that everybody can contribute and participate in science."
Method of Research
Observational study