![]() Even when cyanobacteria are inactive and have shut down all their active defense mechanisms, they’re still bombarded by harmful UV light. Then quickly spring back into action when the rains arrive, Garcia-Pichel said. The only way to survive is to shut down for long periods of time, a form a bacterial hibernation. The dark color protects the cyanobacteria from the damaging UV light of the sun. It turned out the cyanobacteria colonizing the granite boulders produced a special golden-brown compound called scytonemin that functions much like sunscreen. ![]() They were so dark, they were just black.” Fascinated by the black growths, Garcia-Pichel pulled over the car, hopped out and collected some samples. “I was about halfway down, driving along this beautiful desert when I found these strange black films or spots on granite boulders,” he said. Almost thirty years ago, Garcia-Pichel was puttering along the winding Baja coastline on his way to a NASA research station, where he was supposed to be studying how microbes formed dense sea mats. Why would a scientist dedicate so many hours to understanding how desert dwellers survive? Professor Garcia-Pichel and cyanobacteria have a long shared history. Microbes producing brown 'sunscreen' pigment (bottom image) in reaction to ultraviolet light. It doesn't go bad when dry, “like salami”, it just sits there in suspended animation. “It’s very good at doing nothing,” soil scientist professor Ferran Garcia-Pichel explained. To survive in the hostile desert environment, Microcoleus desiccates, which means it dries out and shrinks until it contains only 1-2% water. While the desert is dry, these little guys dig themselves a couple of sand-grains deep below the surface. He and the other research scientists in his lab have discovered that most of these desert residents are thread shaped and absolutely teeny-if you were to braid 10-20 of them together, they would only be as thick as a single strand of human hair.Īfter sifting through many different batches of desert soil, professor Garcia-Pichel has discovered that the most abundant microbe in the Sonoran desert is a blue-green bacterium called Microcoleus. ![]() Many different types of microbes live in the Sonoran desert, according to microbiologist professor Ferran Garcia-Pichel, who studies the minuscule inhabitants surviving in the inhospitable desert. Soil crust showing teeny strands of microbes holding sand grains together. ![]()
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