IT THRIVES in natural saunas hotter than boiling water, where there’s only
hydrogen and carbon dioxide for fuel. Now the genetic machinery of this unique
bacterium has been laid bare by a biotech company, which hopes to exploit some
of the weird proteins that keep the bug alive in such extreme conditions.
Pyrolobus fumarii survives at higher temperatures than any other
known living organism. Diversa Corporation of San Diego, California, announced
last week that it now has the complete sequence of the bug’s genome in the bag.
The sequencing was done for Diversa by Celera Genomics, the company that
sequenced…
