Part 1 of 7 Parts
    “An extremophile is an organism with optimal growth in environmental conditions considered extreme in that it is challenging for a carbon-based life form with water as a solvent, such as all life on Earth, to survive.” They are able to survive and thrive where it is too acidic, toxic, hot, cold or radioactive for other life forms to exist.
    The extremophile bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans was first discovered in 1956 at Oregon State University. It ruined a gamma ray experiment that was intended to sterilize a tin of ground meat. The “sterilized” meat unexpectedly spoiled because of D. radiodurans and its ability to withstand radiation. This microbe can withstand about fifteen hundred times the dose of radiation that would kill a human being.
    D. radiodurans is an unusual specimen of extremophiles. It has evolved to be able to thrive in many different extremely difficult environments. Researchers have dubbed D. radiodurans “a robust generalist” which is capable persevering in the face of prolonged exposure to everything from toxic chemicals and corrosive acids to severe desert heat and subzero temperatures, even the rigors of space. In the decades since its discovery, colonies of D. radiodurans have been found in the coolant water tanks of nuclear reactors and in the weathered granite of Antarctica’s dry valleys. They have even been exposed to the direct sunlight in space as well as the vacuum of space and survived. They have been able to survive in a simulation of the conditions on the surface of Mars.
    How D. radiodurans is able to survive all these harsh conditions is still a controversy today in the community of researchers who study it. Mike Daly is a molecular biologist at Uniformed Services University, a medical college run by the Pentagon in Bethesda, Maryland. He has devoted decades of his life to the study of D. radiodurans. 
     Daly estimates that there are about ten laboratories in the whole world that are dedicated to the study of D. radiodurans. He said, “One of the reasons perhaps that so few people are working on it is because many of the mysteries have been solved. The great questions that we had 20 years ago about what makes this thing so radiation resistant—they have been solved completely in the sense that we have now built on those insights.”
    Both NASA and the National Academy of Sciences have gone to Daly for his insights into D. radiodurans. They were working on the problem of sterilizing satellites to prevent contamination of other worlds and D. radiodurans was difficult to purge. Daly has prepared a modified strain of D. radiodurans for cleaning up radioactive waste sites, reducing toxic hexavalent chromium to nontoxic chromium and decomposing toluene solvent pollutants into safer substances at the U.S. Hanford Reservation in Washington state. Recently, Daly has been studying ways to apply the lessons he has learned about the ability of D. radiodurans to survive radiation to the production of faster, cheaper and safer vaccines.
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