New lineage of microbes living in Yellowstone sheds light on origin of life

Innovation of archaeal lineages is severe to our accommodating of the General tree of life and evolutionary antiquity of the Earth. Yellowstone National park deliver unparalleled openings for studying archaea in habitats that may represent similarities of prompt Earth. 

The originators entitled the novel archaeal lineage Marsarchaeota next Mars, the red planet, because these organisms thrive in habitats containing iron oxides. In the interior of  Marsarchaeota, they revealed two main subcategories that live during Yellowstone and bloom in hot, acidic water where iron oxide is the main mineral.

The effort that occasioned in the Nature Microbiology paper was the culmination of research that took place over the past decade. Archaea is one of the three domains of life, the others being bacteria and eukaryotes. Like bacteria, archaea are single-cell organisms. The eukaryote domain contains more cellularly complex organisms, such as humans, other animals, plants and fungi.