Square bacteria grown in lab for the first time
Carina Dennis

Salt-loving microbe will help study of life in extreme environments.

If bacteria grew on Jupiter or Ganymede, would they look like this?

© Mike Dyall-Smith

An unusual, square bacterium that has eluded scientists since its discovery
almost 25 years ago has been grown in the lab, by two independent teams.
This means researchers can finally investigate the lifestyle and physiology
of what is one of the most salt-resistant microbes.

British microbiologist Anthony Walsby first scooped these salty squares out
of a hypersaline pond near the Red Sea in 1980. Since then, cultivating
"Walsby's square archaeon" in the lab has been a holy grail for
microbiologists studying salt-loving (halophilic) bacteria.

The bacteria are around 0.15 micrometres across and have a remarkable shape,
forming wafer-thin, regular tiles. "They look like postage stamps," says
Henk Bolhuis, of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, who led one
of the groups and has an article in the press with Environmental
Microbiology1.

To study a microbe in the lab, it is essential to be able to cultivate a
plentiful supply of pure sample; it would be impractical to regularly
collect fresh samples from remote locations. But despite numerous attempts,
Walsby's archaeon has resisted being cultured.

"The assumption has been that it was ungrowable," says Mike Dyall-Smith,
whose team at the University of Melbourne, Australia, is the first to
publish a method for cultivation, in the Federation of European
Microbiological Societies' Microbiology Letters

Full Text at Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041011/full/041011-3.html

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