what would be needed for something like that to form
hyper saline environmentshypersaline occur in real life but mostly in the form of lakes, could a whole ocean planet be possible?
Is it possible in about 20 million years? What adaptions would it need?
Halorubrum lacusprofundi is a microorganism found in the extremely cold and hypersaline Deep Lake, Antarctica. This microorganism has a polyextremophilic Ξ²-galactosidase that works to break down carbohydrates. Recent work from the DasSarma group identified six key amino acid residues in Ξ²-galactosidase which, when mutated with amino acids conserved in homologs from mesophilic haloarchaea, induced significant changes to the catalytic efficiency of the enzyme and its temperature dependence (1).
We are running molecular simulations of Ξ²-galactosidase and its mutated variants to explore how these subtle sequence changes affect the behavior of this enzyme at various temperatures. We will analyze the trajectory data to formulate explanations for the mechanisms that cause differences in catalytic efficiencies.
In the future, a better understanding of how evolved mutations help optimize enzyme efficiency may lead to improved methods for computational enzyme design.
The maximum concentration of salt in water is 36% before it precipitates out of solution. Yet there are some lakes (in Antarctica) that have salinities as high as 44% (see here). How do these exist? Is salinity not measure by dissolved salt, or does it also take into account precipitated salt at the bottom of the lake?
http://imgur.com/7PMfqNa
http://i.imgur.com/euLhz5s.png
http://i.imgur.com/vPt84pF.png
I'm a geologist. I collected samples from a salt precipitating pond in Sardinia. I've been having a really hard time identifying these organisms. Any help would be really appreciated.
The pictures were taken using a microscope using plane polarized light and epifluoresencent light using TRITC filters. If you have any questions please ask!
