Microorganisms can indeed live in extreme environments, but the ones that do are highly adapted to survive and little else, according to a collaboration that includes Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the University of Oklahoma.The metagenomic study of a “stressed” microbial community in groundwater near a former waste disposal pond site on DOE’s Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) revealed microbes with an overabundance of genes involved in DNA recombination and repair and other defense mechanisms for dealing with contaminants and other environmental stresses.
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