Yellowstone Hot Spring Teeming with Viruses

At 370 feet in diameter, Grand Prismatic Hot Spring in the Midway Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park is the largest hot spring in Yellowstone and the third largest in the world.

Its temperature is near boiling, ranging in different spots from 145.4 to 188.6 degrees Fahrenheit (63 to 87 degrees Celsius).

The dramatic colors are an interplay of physics, chemistry and biology. While the blue color is an optical effect, the orange and brown colors are bacteria that live at temperatures near boiling. These easily visible, bacterial mats have been the subject of much previous research.

The NSF-funded research carried out by Tom Schoenfeld and David Mead of Lucigen Corp. has examined the microbes and viruses that are not nearly as obvious to the casual observer, but instead are suspended in the crystal-clear water.

Although invisible to the naked eye and even to a standard light microscope, Schoenfeld and Mead have collected viruses from the water columns of nearby hot springs, and using advanced molecular biology techniques, analyzed the viruses' genetic signatures.

The work has shown that every teaspoon of the hot spring water contains hundreds of thousands of viruses categorized by thousands of different viral types.

Similar numbers of microbial cells are in the water, although the microbes are generally less diverse.

This genetic diversity encodes an invaluable resource of biological molecules adapted to function at high temperatures and Lucigen is "mining" them for use in genetic analysis, disease detection, and biofuels production.

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Image credit: David Mead, Lucigen Corporation